HIV/AIDS – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists & Scientists Tamed AIDS

By Scott J. Pearson | May 25, 2025May 25, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Today, it’s easy to forget the days when an HIV diagnosis implied a death sentence within 24 months. Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On tells the story of how the AIDS pandemic played out in the epicenter of San Francisco, and David France, in this book, tells how it played out in the other American epicenter of New York City. He tells how activists and scientists sometimes fought and sometimes collaborated to find how…

Biography-Memoir Healthcare HIV/AIDS

On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service

By Scott J. Pearson | April 19, 2025April 19, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Because of the COVID pandemic, the name Tony Fauci has become incredibly politicized. To some, he is a villain who took over the country through a pandemic. They cynically blame him for all of America’s woes from the coronavirus. To others, he’s a hero for speaking life-conveying truth in a public-health crisis when most others equivocated. I’m in the latter camp, and this book, a memoir mixed with an apologia, certainly explains his perspective on…

HIV/AIDS Religion-Philosophy Society

Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics & the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear

By Scott J. Pearson | December 16, 2024December 16, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

American religion has bifurcated along ideological lines in recent decades. Some voices trumpet a moralistic approach while others trumpet a compassion-driven approach. Some of the early splitting can be observed in the story of how the church treated those afflicted by AIDS in the 1980s. Moralistic voices today still seem to hold the loudest places in the Christian church, but compassionate approaches can be seen everywhere. Journalist Michael O’Loughlin records some of those stories before…

Biography-Memoir Healthcare HIV/AIDS

My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story

By Scott J. Pearson | August 26, 2024August 26, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Stories about HIV and AIDS fascinate me. They speak of our common humanity and our tragically all-too-common inhumanity towards each other. In fear, so many in power sought to sweep this disease and its victims under the rug, yet it pervaded to impact human life in almost every sphere. When AZT first showed promise and HAART later showed effectiveness, many breathed sighs of collective relief. Today, we live in an era of PEPFAR, where the…

Healthcare HIV/AIDS

HIV Vaccine Awareness Day 2023

By Scott J. Pearson | May 18, 2023May 14, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Today is HIV Vaccine Awareness Day. As those around me have probably picked up on, making an HIV vaccine has become one of my causes. In the quickest vaccine development ever, we made a COVID vaccine in a number of months, but it’s been almost 40 years since AIDS came to light, you say… Why haven’t we developed an effective HIV vaccine when COVID’s was made so quickly? For one, COVID has significantly less mutations.…

Healthcare HIV/AIDS Psychology

HIV: Issues with Mental Health & Illness

By Scott J. Pearson | February 11, 2023February 11, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

I write this review sixteen years after the publication of this book – a lifetime for rapidly advancing scientific insights. Nonetheless, this book represents an early attempt to understand how to deal with the relationship of HIV infection and severe mental illness (bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or major depressive disorder). This problem was noted early in HIV’s emergence and began to be systemically addressed more in the 1990s. HIV infection rates at the time of publication…

Healthcare HIV/AIDS

HIV & Aging

By Scott J. Pearson | January 15, 2023January 15, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

The discovery of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART) in the 1990s was a historical game-changer for those infected with HIV. Instead of dying with AIDS four years after diagnosis, patients infected could now live for decades going forward. While certainly a welcome happening, HAART opened up a new set of questions for those affected with HIV along with healthcare providers: How do we handle growing old with HIV? And how does medicine cope with an…

Healthcare HIV/AIDS

World AIDS Day 2022: A Testimonial

By Scott J. Pearson | December 1, 2022November 30, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

Today, December 1, is World AIDS Day. During my second year of medical school, I remember sitting in on a full day of presentations about AIDS. Gabriel Virella always organized an intricate set of lectures on World AIDS Day each year. That year, researchers had just failed (again) in a major trial of a vaccine. Along with immunology, we learned about social and cultural issues about HIV, the different medicines used to treat it, and…

Biography-Memoir Healthcare HIV/AIDS

Nurses on the Inside: Stories of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in NYC

By Scott J. Pearson | November 25, 2022November 25, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

Much has changed since HIV/AIDS first started spreading widely in America. Fortunately, we now have better drugs to treat HIV infections. The healthcare system focuses on prevention through PrEP. America is more accepting of homosexuality, though more progress can always be made. Some things remain similar, though. Preventative vaccines are still a hoped-for but not realized dream. The stigma of a diagnosis still exists, but not nearly as badly as it did in the 1980s…

Fiction-Stories HIV/AIDS Humanities

The Great Believers: A Novel

By Scott J. Pearson | June 20, 2022June 20, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

I find the topic of HIV and AIDS absolutely fascinating – from the horrific sufferings of gay men to its origins in Haiti and Africa, from the elusiveness of the virus away from antivirals to biomedical efforts to limits its transmission, from AZT and HAART therapy to bone marrow transplants, from political stigma and oppression by GOP leaders to GOP efforts to cure the African epidemic, from the frustrating story of decades-long search for an…