Gao Yaojie, exposed China’s AIDS epidemic
Gao Yaojie, a Chinese doctor who defied government pressure in exposing an AIDS epidemic that spread across rural China through reckless blood collection, died Sunday at her home in upper Manhattan. She was 95.
Her death was confirmed by Andrew J. Nathan, a scholar of Chinese politics at Columbia University who managed her affairs in the United States.
Gao’s relentless efforts to expose and halt the epidemic of AIDS among poor farmers in the late 1990s brought her fame in China and acclaim abroad; among others, she was hailed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the Obama administration. But Communist Party officials ultimately tried to silence Dr. Gao, and she spent her last decade in New York.
Even in exile and in faltering health, she continued to speak out about the hundreds of villages — especially in her home province, Henan, in central China — where residents flocked to sell blood at collection stations whose slipshod methods caused tens of thousands of deaths, if not more, from AIDS.
Officials concealed, ignored, or played down the outbreak for years, and infected villagers received little help until the furor that had been inspired by Dr. Gao and several other Chinese doctors and experts prompted the government to distribute medicine.
“AIDS not only killed individuals but destroyed countless families,” Dr. Gao said in an interview with The New York Times in 2016. “This was a manmade catastrophe. Yet the people responsible for it have never been brought to account, nor have they uttered a single word of apology.”
Dr. Gao had retired from dayto-day medicine and was nearing 70 when she took up her second career as an AIDS educator. But her earlier life steeled her for the hardships that were to come.
Dr. Gao was born on Dec. 19, 1927, in eastern Shandong Province. She grew up during the Japanese invasion of China and the civil war that brought the Communists to power under Mao Zedong. She endured the famine caused by Mao’s policies in the late 1950s, and she suffered detention and beatings during his Cultural Revolution. When her accusations of a coverup of an AIDS epidemic brought house detention and pressure from the police and government officials, she said she had lived through far worse.
Dr. Gao, a diminutive woman with a crackling laugh, walked with a limp, and not just because of advancing age. She was born to a relatively well-off landowner and his wife, and as a child her feet were bound with cloth for six years, in the painful traditional Chinese practice intended to create artificially dainty feet.
Her family settled in Kaifeng, an ancient city in Henan, and she soon showed an independent streak, choosing to study medicine at a local university. She graduated in 1953, married soon after, and became a specialist in women’s health.
Dr. Gao was a roving advocate for women’s health in 1996 when she encountered her first patient diagnosed with AIDS, a woman from rural China who had been infected through a blood transfusion during an operation. The woman died about two weeks later.
Dr. Gao began investigating how AIDS had entered villages in Henan. She and other medical workers discovered that hundreds of unscrupulous blood stations, often with official backing, were buying blood from villagers using methods almost guaranteed to spread infections. The stations extracted valuable plasma from the farmers’ blood and pooled the leftover blood, which was then transfused back into villagers in need of the procedure. The vats of pooled blood proved to be a devastatingly effective way to transmit infectious diseases, including HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Dr. Gao moved to the United States in 2009 and began giving talks and writing books about her experiences. Her skepticism about promoting condoms to prevent the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections irritated many AIDS experts.
But the reservoir of respect for her led even critics of her views on preventing AIDS to regard her with affection.
Her husband, Guo Mingjiu, also a doctor, died in 2006. Dr. Gao leaves two daughters, Jingxian Guo and Yanguang Guo; a son, Chufei Guo; a sister, Ming Feng Gao; three grandchildren; and, in China, three brothers and another sister.
In Dr. Gao’s final years, in a West Harlem apartment, a group of Chinese students helped keep her company and edited her writings. She never returned to Henan, but she said she wanted her ashes to be scattered on the Yellow River.