The Moral Danger of Declaring the Pandemic Over Too Soon

The early 1990s were in many ways the most terrible of those first years of the AIDS epidemic in America. Research on the disease was in high gear, but drug after drug failed to stop H.I.V. Funerals for friends and family in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s continued unabated, and many of us at risk for getting sick had given up hope of a normal life. My friends and I, most of us just a few years out of college, lived in the moment because we weren’t sure of how much time we had left.

My cousin Carl died from AIDS-related lymphoma in July 1995. That was also the year I found out that I, too, was H.I.V. positive. I wondered if Carl’s fate might be my own soon enough.

But then we got lucky. In 1996 a new generation of treatments called protease inhibitors emerged that were able to control H.I.V. Doctors talked about the Lazarus effect: watching their patients go from near death to health. I enrolled in a clinical trial and started taking the drugs that...