By 1988, AIDS-related deaths in the United States were averaging one every thirty minutes. That year alone, nearly 16,000 people died, yet federal investment in research, treatment, and prevention remained grossly inadequate. Under the Reagan administration, AIDS was treated as a political liability, not a national emergency. Before this poster was issued, ACT UP’s catchphrase had been “One AIDS death every 13 minutes.” Here, that phrase has been updated to “thirty minutes” (still a shocking and horrible statistic) to take into account the evolving CDC data on mortality rates for those with AIDS. It also reflects ACT UP’s attention to accuracy and detail. On October 11, 1988, ACT UP organized a large-scale protest at the FDA’s headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, to demand faster drug-approval processes and expanded access to experimental AIDS treatments. The action was a response to what activists saw as institutional delays that contributed to preventable deaths. With more than 1,000 participants, it combined civil disobedience with policy critique, drawing national media attention. The protest helped pressure the FDA to adopt new mechanisms, including accelerated approval and parallel track trials, and marked a shift in how government agencies engaged with people living with AIDS and community activists. This poster, along with the two others by the same designer, were used widely to underscore the human costs of inaction and the ways in which big business and government negligence contributed to this extreme human toll.