This is an archive of the Treatment Action Campaign's public documents from
December 1998 until October 2008. I created this website because the TAC's
website appears unmaintained and people were concerned that it
was becoming
increasingly hard to find important documents.
The menu items have
been slightly edited and a new stylesheet applied to the site. But none of the
documents have been edited, not even for minor errors. The text appears on this
site as obtained from the Internet Archive.
The period covered by
the archive encompassed the campaign for HIV medicines, the civil disobedience
campaigns, the Competition Commission complaints, the 2008 xenophobic violence
and the PMTCT, Khayelitsha health workers and Matthias Rath court cases.
23 August 2006
Sibani Mngadi, the Minister of Health's spokesperson claimed that TAC members trashed the Department of Health stand at the International AIDS conference in Toronto. This is a gross exaggeration. We passed the exhibition's lemons and garlic cloves back and forth to mock the idiocy of the stand but these were eventually given back to the stand's officials. We also stuck posters up saying "Fire Manto". These were taken down almost immediately by the officials. No damage was done that we are aware of. Certainly nothing was intentionally damaged. This hardly constitutes trashing the stand.
TAC's efforts in Toronto highlighted the continued unethical deadly actions of the Minister of Health. Our protest was loud, angry, even bitter, but it was non-violent and did not damage property.
How many lives could have been saved if only the Minister and her apologists cared as much for people's lives as they did for the garlic and lemons that made their extravagant stand the embarrassment of the conference?
Video footage of TAC's protest at the SA exhibition in Toronto:
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3