Early activism and ACT UP Harrington first became involved in HIV/AIDS activism after a close friend was diagnosed with HIV in 1988. As the relationships between certain members of ACT UP and officials within the government grew, there began to be infighting with other members of ACT UP. Schulman also writes, "These are the two people most often blamed with ACT UP's downfall and self-defeat, and the two most frequently named at the center of ACT UP's victories and strengths."
Treatment Action Group Issues within ACT UP such as a divided organization, a lack of funding, and tension on how to best allocate time and resources ultimately led to a split in the organization. In response, Harrington along with 20 other members of ACT UP left the organization in 1992 to form their own group known as the
Treatment Action Group, or TAG. To Harrington, the split did not represent a failure on ACT UP's part. Instead, it was a necessary and foreseeable event as the organization was not destined to last. The foundational principles of TAG were to foster the relationships between activists and researchers (both public and private), serve as a watchdog for ethical practices, and support research that led to the best possible treatments. Harrington and his fellow founding members of TAG hoped for a new era to HIV/AIDS activism, and activism in general, in which the government was not an enemy but a partner. Harrington has said that the most important part to the work of TAG was to make researchers more aware of the needs of the people whom their research impacts, in this case people with HIV/AIDS, and for people to be more educated about the work of researchers, with TAG being the intermediary between the two. The first major policy victory for Harrington and TAG was the report
AIDS Research at the NIH: A Critical Review. Drafted in 1992 by Harrington and fellow TAG member
Gregg Gonsalves, the report outlined certain suggestions the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) should take to better allocate resources towards HIV/AIDS research. The NIH listened to these suggestions and incorporated them into the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, signed into effect by President
Bill Clinton. The act restructured and strengthened the NIH AIDS research program and created the
Office of AIDS Research to oversee all forms of HIV/AIDS research in the United States. In 1992, Harrington delivered his "Pathogenesis and Activism" speech at the Eighth International AIDS Conference in
Amsterdam. There, Harrington promoted TAG's strategy of cooperation with the AIDS research establishment instead of confrontation. Along with this, he used his own HIV-infected lymph nodes to explain some of the mechanisms behind HIV and to urge other people with AIDS to take part in research trials. His speech also doubled as a public "coming out" as an HIV-positive person, which many were not aware of. Other notable accomplishments for Harrington and TAG were the papers
The Crisis in Clinical AIDS Research (1993),
Rescuing Accelerated Approval: Moving Beyond the Status Quo (1994), and
Problems with Protease Inhibitor Development Plans (1995). The first was his own paper which highlighted the poor standards in clinical trials conducted by the
U.S. Department of Defense, the
AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG), and other organizations. The other two papers were significant during the development of
protease inhibitors in the mid-1990s. == Current work ==