Skip to main contentFrontline activists often wonder whether people who are supposedly on their side are actually sabotaging projects behind their backs. This suspicion, a form of post-traumatic stress disorder born of prolonged exposure to political conflict, is often counterproductive. This week, however, we found proof of the adage just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
The case starts with AIDS activist Steve Carroll, facilitating director of AIDS Services Access and Accountability Coalition. Alarmed by a budget shortfall for the state's AIDS-drug program, Care Assist, Carroll decided to write a grant to provide stopgap funding. He contacted Care Assist for data to bolster his grant application.
The recipient of his request was epidemiologist Dr. Mark Loveless, the state employee who runs Care Assist for the Department of Human Resources. Rather then greenlight Carroll's request, however, Loveless instructed his staff to kill it with kindness.
In an email, Loveless advised a colleague to "generously flood" Carroll with "huge stacks of EXISTING data" in hard-copy form and to intentionally include redundant and irrelevant statistics. "Let him try and sort it out, and if he is overwhelmed and he wants US to do the analysis, we can kindly refuse," Loveless wrote.
No one would have ever known of Loveless' less-than-benevolent intentions if it hadn't been for his own human error. Rather than forwarding Carroll's query, the doctor accidentally hit "reply," sending his instructions right back to a baffled Carroll.
"I had to read it three times through," Carroll recalls.
Then it hit him. All along, Carroll had had the sinking feeling that his and other AIDS activists' requests for information were dismissed by government workers resentful of outsiders second-guessing their work. Now he had written proof. We were likewise perplexed. Loveless is generally known as a force for good in the fight against AIDS. In fact, his actions seem almost unconscious, revealing his id like a Greek chorus.
Loveless was out of town as WW went to press, so his subsequent emailed mea culpa--which appeared in Carroll's in-box a few hours later--stands as his response: "No amount of pressure on our program's work, justified or otherwise, should warrant the momentary loss of civility that I displayed. I hope that you might be able to overlook this lapse, which in retrospect seems quite out of character for me."
Loveless' apology, however apt, is misdirected. Patients in need of medication are the real victims here. By undermining Carroll's good intentions, Loveless risked harming the very people he has worked so hard to help.
WWeek 2015