November 12, 1996
Dale Peck
92 St. Mark’s Place, #4
New York, NY 10009
tel: (212) 388-0461
fax: (212) 254-5717
Letters to the Editor
Magazine
The New York Times
229 W. 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036
To the Editor:
It is understandable that Andrew Sullivan, as a P.W.A., should invest a great amount of hope in protease inhibitors; but, as a journalist, he should have known better than to forecast the end of the AIDS pandemic based on a treatment regimen that, in the first place, does not work for everyone who tries it, in the second, is not available to the vast majority of people with H.I.V. and AIDS, and, in the third, has only been in serious testing for one year. That protease inhibitors have had profoundly beneficial effects for many P.W.A.s is cause for celebration and perhaps even for hope; nevertheless, an enormous amount of research still needs to be done on these and many other drugs, and a prediction of victory in the battle against AIDS—let alone victory itself—is still years away. Mr. Sullivan has cottoned on to a mood among certain persons involved in the pandemic and distorted it into a manifesto that is in reality not much more than a wish-fulfillment fantasy. And, while I pray that Mr. Sullivan is in fact correct in his predictions, prudence—and, more to the point, an attentiveness to scientific fact—would have served better than the three or four mini-biographies of P.W.A.s he offers instead. Empathy probably won’t hurt anyone struggling with this disease, but it won’t help them much either, and it won’t cure anyone.
Dale Peck