Prize Fight: The Battle to Control the AIDS Narrative and its Lessons for Modern Medical Knowledge

Venue
The New York Academy of Medicine
1216 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street
New York, NY 10029

The event is free; advance registration is required.

Register

To commemorate the 38th annual World AIDS DAY 2025 at NYAM, two scholars will debate the contentious legacy of Dr. Peter Duesberg, a retrovirologist at the University of California, Berkeley who challenged the dogma that HIV causes AIDS. Join Dr. William Summers, MD, PhD, professor emeritus Yale University and Tyler Harvey, AIDS activist and Yale MD-PhD student, as they dissect perspectives of this contentious public debate.

Today’s debates over vaccination, COVID-19 origins, protocols, and treatment evoke similar questions about medical trust and knowledge-making.

Agenda

Speakers

William Summers, MD, PhD

Professor William C. Summers’ interests range from molecular biology to Chinese culture and history. A well-published researcher in virology and in the history of science and medicine, Professor Summers earned both his M.D. and his Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin in 1967. He joined the Yale faculty in 1968. Professor Summers has held fellowships and visiting faculty positions at major research universities in the United States, Sweden, Great Britain, and China; he serves on numerous panels and editorial boards.

He first traveled to the People’s Republic of China in 1980 with the Yale delegation that re-established the medical exchange program with the Hunan Medical College. Professor Summers has done extensive research on Chinese public health and medicine, publishing articles on historic parallels between Chinese and Western medical development, Chinese government medical policy, and the Great Manchurian Plague.

At Yale, students enjoy Professor Summers’ Freshman seminar, “Epidemics in Global Perspective,” which deals with historical issues of policy and epidemic disease. He also teaches a seminar on the history of Chinese science in which he deals with Chinese concepts of the natural world, Asian technological development, and East-West scientific interactions, as well as courses on the history of molecular biology, and the history of physical sciences since Newton.

Tyler D. Harvey

Tyler D. Harvey is a social scientist and MD/PhD candidate at the Yale School of Medicine. Previously, Tyler was a Thomas J. Watson fellow where they completed an international fellowship across six diverse low-income countries titled, “Embodied Poverty: Experiences and Voices of the Poor, Sick, and Surviving.” As a graduate student in public health, Tyler served as the Executive Director of HAVEN Free Clinic, a student-run primary health care clinic that partners with Yale to provide services to the New Haven community free of charge. Most recently, Tyler was the Center Administrator at the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice, an academic center focused on addressing the health harms of mass incarceration.

At Yale, Tyler is a student leader of the US Health Justice elective and a student advisor to the Health Equity Thread within the Yale School of Medicine curriculum. Tyler is also currently a research fellow with the Yale LGBTQ+ Mental Health Initiative and the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at the Yale Law School. Between 2023 – 2024, they served as a representative on the Presidential Search Student Advisory Council for Yale’s next President.

Tyler sees medicine and science as tools to liberate and uplift the most marginalized communities. Specifically, their research examine structural determinants of health and evaluates clinical and public health interventions aimed at eliminating health inequities for LGBTQ+ populations. This work has been published in leading medical and public health journals, such as JAMA Network Open, LGBT Health, and Social Science and Medicine and has been used alongside work with local and international agencies, including the NYC Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and World Health Organization. Tyler was previously a Public Voices Fellow with TheOpEdProject in partnership with AcademyHealth, publishing numerous opinion pieces on health equity in top media outlets, including The Hill and Newsweek.

Originally from the rural South, Tyler is a first-generation college graduate and holds a BA in Urban Studies from Rhodes College and MPH from the Yale School of Public Health.