How to Survive a Plague Blog Post

How to Survive a Plague deals with one facet of the AIDS crisis--the activist community's ability to affect governments and pharmaceutical companies in the creation of drugs to treat the disease. The film documents the protest movements to create this change. For your blog post, I would like for you to think about protests. What makes an effective protest? Why do groups of people use protests? Was there any other way the AIDS activists could have gotten what they wanted and needed?