The King of AIDS Treatments Is Turning to COVID-19

At the LGBTQ senior community where John James lives in Philadelphia, residents keep busy with trips to the garden or—before the pandemic—screenings of Strangers on a Train in the rec room. James does not care for any of that right now. Each morning, he combs through medical-research databases and downloads every paper he can find on COVID-19 treatments, scribbling notes about the parts that stand out. Most days, he reads papers at his desk until 1 a.m. Besides research, “there’s not much else I do in the day,” he told me. “I’m 79. I’m retired. I want to do things that are serious.”

All of his work is in service of a he recently launched, called COVIDSalon: Treatment Options. He updates it nearly every day, tracking the highest-profile and most promising COVID-19 drugs. It’s an old-school, text-heavy site, with reporting about drug trials, links to outside resources, and overviews of medications in the