Meet The Man Who Stopped Thousands Of People Becoming HIV-Positive
“I knew I was doing something of substance, but it’s really
overwhelming.” In an exclusive interview with BuzzFeed News, Greg Owen
reveals the story behind Britain’s largest ever drop in HIV
transmissions.
posted on Feb. 25, 2017, at 9:49 a.m.
A few days before Christmas 2016, a phone call took place that no one could have predicted.
One
of the world’s most esteemed HIV doctors, Professor Sheena McCormack –
whose life’s work as an epidemiologist has been to track and fight the
virus – picked up the phone to deliver a message that would make
headline news: In the space of 12 months, the number of gay men in
London being diagnosed with HIV had
dropped by 40%. Across England it was down by a third.
No
British doctor has been able to report a fall this steep in more than
35 years of the virus. It is the kind of figure that in medical circles
is so large as to look jarring, even false; and yet it was true.
Behind
this story lay a series of secret meetings and a network of people with
one man at the centre who, unknown to the public, helped change medical
history. His name is Greg Owen. He was the man McCormack phoned. Today
his story is told in full for the first time.
Owen sits in an echoing meeting room in the BuzzFeed News office
recalling that conversation, and what it was that McCormack really
wanted to convey to him about those figures.
“She said, ‘Don’t
look at the percentage; I want you to look at this another way. There
are thousands of people who didn’t become HIV-positive this year because
of you.’”
Owen started to cry. And after that call, he says, he used to cry every day.
“I
knew I was doing something of substance, but I didn’t know what. It
feels really good but it’s really overwhelming because how many people
in my position get to do what I did?”
The man McCormack credited
with this unprecedented reduction in HIV transmissions was not a fellow
doctor, nor the head of a charity, nor even a politician. Owen is
unemployed, a former sex worker, and homeless.
What he managed to
pull off – and why – is so outlandish it warrants comparisons with Ron
Woodroof, the AIDS patient depicted by Matthew McConaughey in
Dallas Buyers Club, who in 1980s America smuggled in unauthorised HIV drugs for desperate fellow sufferers.
The
difference is that Woodroof’s was an outrageous story that ended in
tragedy. Owen’s is a tragic story that ends in outrageous success.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
In the summer of 2015, Owen was 35 and working part-time as a barman
and club promoter. One of six children, from a working-class Catholic
family in Northern Ireland, he had come to England to train as an actor
before finding his way into London’s bacchanalian nightlife. That
summer, he was trying to make a difficult decision.
He had heard
about a new drug regime that was being used to prevent HIV. The
medication’s brand name is Truvada, and the regime – which involves
taking this antiretroviral pill every day – is dubbed PrEP: pre-exposure
prophylaxis. Owen, fearful of contracting the virus amid this unleashed
world, couldn’t decide whether to start taking the drug, let alone how
to obtain it.
PrEP was not available on the NHS and a private
prescription would cost about £500 per month. But a major NHS study was
underway to ascertain how effective the drug was, and who should be
given it. The study, called PROUD, was being run by Professor McCormack.
“I
heard about the PROUD study at a sex party,” says Owen, casually, in
the middle of a much longer sentence. He talks at twice the speed of
most people, with clauses within clauses and tangents branching from
other tangents in a bewildering cascade of verbal Russian dolls.
The
problem was that Owen was too late to enrol in the study. He was also
increasingly aware of his own chaotic situation: After a relationship
breakdown and a suicide attempt, Owen was sleeping on friends’ sofas and
sliding into full escapism mode.
“I’d gone through enough
risk-taking,” he says in his soft Belfast accent. “I was like, ‘You know
what? I just need to do this – I take GHB and smoke crystal [meth] all
weekend.’”
But there was another reason for Owen’s determination.
He had watched someone he loved (who we cannot name in order to protect
their anonymity) fall apart after being diagnosed.
“He was in a
really bad state,” says Owen. The man descended so far into the drugs
scene in an attempt to blot out the diagnosis that he had had a heart
attack soon after. “He was having a breakdown. Everything was fucked.”
After
trying in vain to help him, Owen focused on remaining HIV-negative
himself and seeing if there was some way to help HIV-positive people
more generally.
On 11 August 2015, Owen posted on Facebook to let
his friends know that he planned to begin taking PrEP. A friend, who was
HIV-positive and had been prescribed the drug as part of his treatment
before switching medication, offered him some spare pills. Owen’s plan
was to start taking them and blog about his experiences – a “blow by
blow” account, he says, laughing. Owen laughs a lot when he isn’t
raging, frowning, or grinning with delight – often with a frenzy of
gestures. He is rarely still.
The day after the Facebook post, he went to a sexual health clinic to
double-check he was HIV-negative before taking the pills. Moments
later, the nurse gave him the result of the rapid pin-prick blood test:
It was positive. He had missed his chance to prevent it.
“I felt sick,” says Owen. “I said, ‘I need to have a cigarette.’ I was in shock.”
The
following evening, aware that his friends on Facebook would soon be
asking how he was getting on with PrEP, and while working a shift in a
gay bar, Owen posted an update on the site telling everyone he was
HIV-positive.
That single act triggered a chain of events that would change everything.
“When
I came out on my break two hours later, I had 375 likes, 175 comments,
50 shares. I was like, ‘Sweet Jesus,’” he says. “Then I opened my
Messenger – streams of disclosures and supportive messages from people. I
must have had 50 or 60 people in two hours saying, ‘I can’t believe
you’ve done that, I’m HIV-positive as well and I haven’t told anyone,’
or, ‘I have only told my family and you’ve told 5,000 people.’”
But
then the messages started changing. “People were like, ‘What is this
PrEP thing and if you had it why wouldn’t you have become HIV-positive?’
It got to a point within a week where I would get 10 people a day
asking me about PrEP – and that’s 10 people asking 10 questions each.”
Keen
to get on with life and with his blog, Owen found the questions from
acquaintances and strangers were proving a near-constant interruption.
He told his friend Alex that something had to give. And it was then that
he remembered something.
“I was like, ‘I’m sure I was at a
meeting somewhere and heard you can import generic hepatitis C drugs for
a tenth of the price,’” he says. This thought fused with the need to
rid himself of the endless inquiries, or “these fucking bastards asking
me about PrEP”, as he puts it.
He decided to set up a website with
all the information he could find, thus allowing him to “walk away from
PrEP”. He laughs at the irony. It would prove to do the opposite. The
idea for the site wasn’t only to provide facts; it was also going to
help readers buy cheap, non-branded versions of the drug – known as
“generics” – from manufacturers overseas.
Owen just had to figure out how to do this. He knew someone who
worked in a sexual health clinic, whom he prefers not to name, for
reasons that soon become clear. He phoned the man up.
“I said,
‘I’m aware we can maybe import something? Do you know anything about
this?’ And he replied, ‘Yeeeeees. Come in tomorrow at 3pm.’”
The next day they met in the clinic. Owen was told to keep everything confidential.
“This
person said, ‘We have a handful of people who use our clinic and they
have been self-sourcing generics from this website and we have been
discreetly doing the monitoring – discreetly checking their blood
periodically to check that there’s active levels of the drug.’”
In
one sentence, everything was possible. There was somewhere to buy the
non-branded versions of the drug – and at around £50 a month, a tenth of
the price of a private prescription. And there was, potentially, a way
to ensure the drugs were working properly. At the time, because PrEP was
not available on the NHS, neither – officially – were the urine and
blood tests needed to check that the drugs were not adversely affecting
kidney function (which some antiretrovirals can do) and were not fake.
The
man in the clinic, says Owen, then made the possible workable: He
showed Owen which websites were supplying this handful of patients with
the generics, and which ones they knew – because they had run the tests –
were supplying the effective pills.
“I said, ‘So this is legit –
legit but dodgy. Can we do this?’ And he said, ‘Not only can you do
this; you must do this. We’ve been waiting for someone to do this. We’re
diagnosing people every day and do you know how heart-breaking it is to
know that PrEP would stop it and not be able to do something?’”
And
that, says Owen, was all the motivation he needed. He and his friend
Alex spent a few weeks building the website, gathering as much
information as they could, and including a simple click-to-buy button
that linked through to the pharmacies in Asia that sold and shipped the
generics. They called it
IWantPrEPNow.co.uk.
“At
the time I was shitting myself,” he says. “I was thinking, ‘It’s not
like I’m selling Viagra that might work or might not work – the worst
that happens is you don’t get a boner – I’m selling drugs where people
might rely on it for their HIV protection.”
But by then,
September 2015, the results of the PROUD study were in: PrEP was
enormously effective – comparable to condoms – but unlike condoms, this
pill is not reliant on people being able or willing to implement the
precaution at the very moment when desire can overwhelm. Add in drugs or
alcohol, low self-esteem or even self-destruction, and the underuse of
condoms across all demographics is hardly surprising. PrEP offered a
viable alternative.
Trump Photo Credit: Reuters/Channel 2 News
Six White House staffers were escorted off the premises last week after
reportedly failing to pass a FBI background check, Politico reported on
Wednesday. Among the reportedly removed staffers was White House Chief
Digital Officer Gerrit Lansing, who previously led the Republican
National Convention’s digital efforts. Additionally, Politico reported,
Trump’s director of scheduling Caroline Wiles did not pass the
background check and resigned 
NASA announced on Wednesday that seven Earth-sized planets have been
spotted around a small star in the Aquarius constellation. Michaël
Gillon, an astrophysicist at the University of Liège in Belgium, said
the star is "so small and cold that the seven planets are temperate,
which means that they could have some liquid water and maybe life, by
extension, on the surface." The discovery marks the first time that so
many planets close to Earth's size have been found in orbit around the
same star, called Trappist-1. Scientists have said the news brings new
hope that the Milky Way may resemble our own home and even could spur on
the hunt for alien life. 
White House spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway was sidelined from appearing on
television in the wake of her on-air remarks contradicting official
comments on the Michael Flynn controversy, CNN reported on Wednesday.
Conway has not appeared on television since remarking last week that
Flynn offered to resign in the wake of his scandal surrounding his
discussion of sanctions with a Russian ambassador. That same day,
however, the White House officially said President Trump asked Flynn to
resign. Conway was “off message,” a White House source told CNN.
“Clearly they're having much more of a drama-free week,” another source
close to the White House said. “Having Kellyanne off television is
helping them.” Conway had also come under fire the week prior for openly
promoting Ivanka Trump’s clothing line during an interview with Fox
News—an ethical violation, as suggested by the House Oversight
Committee’s bipartisan leadership.
President Trump on Wednesday visited the National Museum of African
American History and Culture and was reportedly moved to audibly comment
on the horrific nature of slavery during his tour. Martin Luther King
Jr.’s niece Alveda King accompanied the president and, according to the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said that when Trump came upon a stone
auction block for selling slaves, he commented: “Boy, that is just not
good. That is not good.” Later, when he saw a set of shackles used on
slave children, he said, according to King: “That is really bad. That is
really bad.”
