T A G TREATMENT ACTION GROUP INC

TAG envisions the end of the HIV, TB, and HCV pandemics with the discovery, development, and worldwide dissemination of safe and effective diagnostics, preventives, and cures through public health structures that end systemic harms and promote human rights, and that are developed by the diverse communities most affected by these conditions. This vision will be realized based on data and science, and achieved through community engagement, distributive justice, and equitable access to the benefits of science.

Treatment Action Group (TAG) is an independent, activist, and community-based research and policy think tank committed to racial, gender, and LGBTQ+ equity; social justice; and liberation, fighting to end HIV, tuberculosis (TB), and hepatitis C virus (HCV). TAG catalyzes open collective action by affected communities, scientists, and policymakers to ensure that all people living with or impacted by HIV, TB, or HCV — especially communities of color and other marginalized communities experiencing inequities — receive life-saving prevention, diagnosis, treatment, care, and information. We are science-based activists working to expand and accelerate vital research and effective community engagement with research and policy institutions for an end to the HIV, TB, and HCV pandemics.

Our theory of change centers on the premise that achieving the quality, high-impact science and care needed to end these pandemics requires increased funding, enabling policy environments, and engaged communities. These factors depend on advocacy grounded in human rights and led by research-literate activists who follow the science and can represent research and policy needs to governments and developers, and serve as a bridge back to affected communities.

TAG's work to promote and expand efforts to sustainably end the HIV, HCV, and TB pandemics, is based on the following key strategies:
1. Increase funding for research and programs to end these pandemics:
-Build a strong evidence base for advocacy in support of increasing R&D funding
-Promote advocacy toward meeting community-determined funding targets
-Educate policymakers to inform US and other countries' appropriations for R&D and programming
2. Create an enabling policy environment
-Coordinate advocacy efforts and messages among key partner organizations and coalitions in order to deepen and expand sources of funding for research and programs
-Partner with coalitions and support the capacity of affected communities in the U.S. and globally to advocate with policymakers in support of funding for research and a needs-driven, people-centered research and policy agenda
-Facilitate stronger links between researchers, health departments, and advocates
-Influence legislation
-Track the pipelines for new diagnostics, curative and preventive drugs, and vaccines
3. Support community engagement in R&D
-Coordinate community advisory boards
-Develop and disseminate literacy materials to capacitate communities on fundamentals of diseases, research, policy, advocacy
-Influence research agendas and provide community input to research sponsors
4. Support implementation of evidence-based research outcomes
-Translate key scientific advances into actionable messages for communities and policymakers
-Participate in WHO, CDC, state-level guideline development
-Advocate for ending the epidemics through uptake of innovations
-Advocate for the availability, affordability, and accessibility of innovations

We are science-based activists working to expand and accelerate vital research to end TB and to promote effective community engagement with research and policy institutions. TAG builds bridges between scientists, grassroots advocates, and policy makers. We equip activists with the information they need to advocate for TB research and access to its benefits. TAG translates complex scientific concepts and developments into actionable, evidence-based campaigns and knows how to engage policymakers on complex technical topics.

During the early 1990s, TAG members advocated with government scientists, drug company researchers, and U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials to speed the development of new HIV therapies. TAG produced an influential policy report recommending government investment in basic science, which catalyzed increased funding to the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the reorganization the national AIDS research effort. TAG helped reform the FDA’s regulation of new drugs for HIV and related infections, creating faster but still rigorous pathways, such as parallel track and accelerated approval. These reforms led to the development and approval of highly active combination antiretroviral therapy in 1996. Since then, the FDA has approved over 40 lifesaving treatment options for HIV.
In the early 2000s, TAG began work with international partners to support HIV treatment literacy and equitable access to innovations for affected communities around the world. Because of these partnerships, TAG began applying its research and access activism to address the impact of tuberculosis (TB) around the world. Soon after, TAG also added viral hepatitis to its portfolio, given high rates of coinfection among people with HIV.
In the 2010s, TAG helped pioneer in New York the first-ever Statewide commitments to end HIV, and later HCV. TAG’s advocacy has contributed to a near tripling in global investment in TB research and development, resulting in several treatment, prevention, and diagnostic improvements (https://www.treatmentactiongroup.org/resources/tbrd-report/tbrd-report-2020/). TAG has contributed to evidenced-based guidelines from the CDC and the WHO in the treatment and prevention of HIV, TB, and HCV.
Throughout TAG’s history, building collective power through meaningful community engagement has been at our core. TAG remains committed to working alongside communities and policymakers to advance a research and policy agenda grounded in science, justice and equity, and human rights, to end the HIHIV, TB, and HCV epidemics.
You can read more about TAG’s legacy and accomplishments here: https://www.treatmentactiongroup.org/publication/about-tag-the-legacy-and-future-of-activism-to-catalyze-the-end-to-hiv-aids-tuberculosis-and-hepatitis-c/ and here: https://www.treatmentactiongroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/tagline_11_2019_intro_regime_change.pdf

Founded in New York City during the darkest days in the global struggle against HIV, TAG has been pivotal in building a strong and effective national and international response to the pandemic. In the 1990s, TAG led efforts to expand and accelerate research on, access to, and approval of protease inhibitors, which unlocked the key to effective combination anti-HIV treatment in 1996. After their approval, AIDS deaths in the U.S. and other developed countries dropped by 67% in just two years.

In the decade from the year 2000, TAG led efforts to implement combination HIV treatment worldwide, participating in the World Health Organization's (WHO) HIV treatment guidelines, spurring the establishment of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (GFATM). As a result of these efforts, for the first time in 2017 more than half the world's people living with HIV – 19.5 million of 37.5 million people living with HIV are receiving HIV treatment.
Over the past decade TAG has played a significant leadership roles in advocacy to meet domestic as well as global research, prevention and treatment priorities. As a result, there has been an exponential growth in research and policies aimed at maximizing the number of people living with or vulnerable to HIV infection who are engaged in care and accessing an expanded array of evidence-based services and interventions.
In 2012, we joined forces with Housing Works to create a New York State-wide coalition of community groups, public health officials, providers, and government officials, which led, in 2014, to Governor Andrew M. Cuomo's launch of the “Bending the Curve" initiative to end AIDS as an epidemic in New York State by the end of 2020. TAG helped lead the Governor's Ending the Epidemic Task Force, whose Blueprint to End AIDS in NYS was launched in April 2015.
Much of the progress we've achieved over the past 25 years is now in grave danger. We face a White House administration and Congress relentless in their threats to repeal the Affordable Care Act and to end Medicaid as a federal entitlement. The NIH Office of AIDS Research has been threatened for funding cuts by Congress. Now more than ever, TAG must remain heavily involved in broad coalition efforts to defend against these threats.
TAG is working to lead an unprecedented community mobilization effort to end HIV as an epidemic, both nationally and in high-HIV-burdened places. In addition to our goals of not just defending, but expanding federal research commitments and policies, we are collaborating with groups across the United States, notably in the Deep South, to catalyze local and state efforts to end their epidemics, using and adapting strategies, advocacy, and programs now being brought to scale in New York.