Last December a couple of weeks before Christmas, Gao Yaojie, who helped expose China’s AIDs scandal in the 1990s, died in her New York home aged 95.
Gao, known affectionately as Grandma Gao, was already in her sixties and a retired gynecologist when she was alerted to the alarmingly high rates of HIV infections in the Chinese countryside. She revealed how blood banks were infecting donors in poor rural areas with HIV due to their unethical and unhygienic practices such as using dirty needles and pooling donated blood. At least tens of thousands of donors went on to die from AIDs.
For years, Gao spoke out about this scandal despite official efforts to conceal the epidemic. She eventually left China to live in the US in 2009 because of constant government surveillance. She continued to write books and speak out for health and human rights from her home in New York despite battling her own health issues. She is also known for championing the cause of AIDS orphans, children whose parents died of AIDS because of the scandal.
Earlier this year, independent online magazine Mang Mang published a conversation between two friends of Gao: Lin Shiyu, who wrote a book about her life “The Oral History of Gao Yaojie” and Vivian Wu, former BBC journalist and founder of Mighty Voice Media who was making a documentary about Gao when she died.
In that documentary Gao tells Wu: “It’s too bad these people [farmers who were infected with HIV] had to die in such a miserable way. It’s unfair. I...
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