PMA Action
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2024-04-29T12:35:02-07:00
Premarket Approval Protests
Another action in the Mary Lucey and Nancy MacNeil Collection with an unknown date, and an unknown location is the PMA action, most likely referring to the United States Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) premarket approval (PMA) policies that were slow to react to mass death, keeping drugs off the market. When drug approval processes were sped up, healthcare conglomerates and pharmaceutical companies were allowed to keep these drugs expensive and inaccessible.
On March 17, 1987 it was announced that the FDA had approved the anti-viral drug azidothymidine (AZT) for the treatment of AIDS, just two years after it entered the approval process. The approval process for drugs of this class were typically 8-10 years. No other drugs in development to fight AIDS were given this treatment, prompting protest from AIDS activists. Yet shortly after AZT’s approval, pharmaceutical company Burroughs-Wellcome announced that it had been granted a monopoly on the drug’s patent, and its cost would be upwards of $10,000 for a single patient annually, making it the costliest drug ever.[1]
FDA headquarters, and Wall Street and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York City were all targets of ACT UP protests in the late 1980s, but the photos from Mary and Nancy were most likely from 1990 onward.
Citations
[1] “U.S. AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) Demands Access to Drugs, 1987-89 | Global Nonviolent Action Database,” accessed November 10, 2023, https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/us-aids-coalition-unleash-power-act-demands-access-drugs-1987-89.
