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

Monday, December 8, 2025
5:30pm-7:30pm

Venue
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 Harvey is an MD/PhD candidate at Yale University. Tyler is pursuing a PhD in the Social and Behavioral Sciences department at the Yale School of Public Health and within the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice, an academic center dedicated to studying and intervening on the health harms of mass incarceration.

At Yale, Tyler has held leadership roles across health justice initiatives, including serving as a student leader in the US Health Justice elective and as an advisor to the Health Equity Thread. Tyler has served as a research fellow with both the Yale LGBTQ+ Mental Health Initiative and the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at the Yale Law School. Tyler served on Yale’s Presidential Search Student Advisory Council from 2023 to 2024 and was named a 2025 Health Policy Research Scholar by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Their scholarship appears in JAMA Network Open, American Journal of Public Health, and Social Science & Medicine, and has informed policy and practice at organizations such as the NYC Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and the World Health Organization. As a former Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, Tyler has published widely on health equity in national media outlets including The Hill and Newsweek.

Tyler has been involved in public health community work and research related to HIV for years; first within community organizations in Memphis, TN and Flatbush, Brooklyn to increase HIV testing among LGBTQ+ populations; then through an academic-community research partnership in New Haven, CT to implement a group-based mental health therapy to decrease HIV risk among gay and bisexual men of color; and most recently, as a volunteer with Black and Pink in NYC, a prison abolitionist organization dedicated to LGBTQ+ and HIV+ individuals currently incarcerated. One of their most recent op-eds published in Newsweek argued for the inclusion of incarerated individuals within current HIV elimination efforts.

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