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In response to both the President's EO and the announcement by the drug companies, ACT UP reasserted several demands:

1. Deep price reductions for people with HIV in developing nations.
2. Agreement from firms that hold patents to grant voluntary licenses for alternative drug production and importation by poor countries.
3. Reduced corporate drug prices must not require an agreement by a country to abandon compulsory licensing and parallel importing.
4. Significant price reduction must cover all drug used to treat HIV, not only anti-viral drugs.
5. An open and transparent development of policy, involving local representatives and consumers at all levels.
6. Suspension of lawsuits against nations that use strategies like compulsory licensing and parallel importing.

ACT UP's role continues to be crucial in challenging administration policy and corporate profiteering, and it reveals a sea change within the organization itself. In the late 1980s and much of the 90s, ACT UP New York served as a model for chapters that sprang up around the US, and New York led the movement for access to AIDS drugs, housing for people with HIV, sane education and prevention policies, and universal health care. As members began to fall away, through death, burn-out, attraction to other activist venues, the smothering effect of a president who claimed to "feel our pain" while offering some access and a few concessions, and many other reasons, ACT UP New York's presence faded.

By the end of the 90s, Philadelphia had became the center of ACT UP gravity. ACT UP Philly took the lead on the crisis of drug access in developing nations. Its membership displays the changing demographic of AIDS itself. At a major demonstration on October 8, 1999 at the office of U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky in Washington, D.C., the overwhelming majority of participants were bussed in from Philadelphia. Out of over 500 protestors, at least 90% were African American, a fact ignored by both mainstream and gay media. 14 people were arrested for lying down in the street in an act of civil disobedience.

ACT UP Philly also organized protests to coincide with World AIDS Day and the WTO summit in Seattle on November 30 and December 1, and sent buses to the mid-April protests at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. Some ACT UP members and others reported severe abuse, including homophobic and sexual harassment, at the hands of D.C. police and, even more so, by U.S. Marshals, in the streets and in jail after arrests for civil disobedience.

ACT UP Philadelphia suffered a tremendous blow on May 10 with the death of Kiyoshi Kuromiya, a long-time activist for the rights and well-being of queers and people with HIV. Kiyoshi founded and published the Critical Path AIDS Project newsletter and source of information on access to aggressive HIV treatments. Philadelphia FIGHT, its fiscal sponsor, said it would continue the work of Critical Path, under the interim leadership of Julie Davids, founder of Project TEACH (Treatment Education Activists Combating HIV).

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