There is, for McCormack, no question about what led to the fall in new infections. In the years leading up the end of 2015, a swath of new efforts were being made by sexual health clinics to increase testing and treatment, in the hope that that would bring new cases down – and it failed to do so. “The main reason is PrEP,” she says.

Not only did IWantPrEPNow provide access to it, but also the increases in traffic to the site correlated precisely with both the rise in patients on generic PrEP drugs coming into clinics as well as the decline in transmissions.

“Inquiries to the website peaked in July and stayed at a very high level since,” she says. “And if we look at our numbers of new PrEP starters, they peaked around that time and that’s when we started to notice a very big drop in new infections.”

The effect of Owen’s website has not only been seen in the UK, says McCormack. “It’s people in Europe who also don’t have access to PrEP and they also use IWantPrEPNow and find ways to access their drugs with the UK mechanism.” Rates of new infections in key European cities such as Barcelona and Amsterdam have also been plunging in the last year, she adds.

The total number of people who remained HIV-negative because of IWantPrEPNow may never be known precisely but for McCormack the scale of it and the overall picture, never before seen, is overwhelming for those working in the field.

“It’s indescribable,” she says. “It’s the ultimate reward for everything you do – or you try to do – to actually see this kind of difference. It’s the impact you dream about.”

Owen echoes this. “It’s amazing,” he says. “To make my HIV status count, and to fight back. It was really taxing and it cost me a lot personally – I don’t know how I didn’t break. I look back, the past 18 months, and think, Wow. I did the best I could do. Life went to shit, the failed suicide attempt, and I couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong, and now I think if I hadn’t taken so much interest in HIV, I wouldn’t have been as dedicated to wanting to rectify that and even up the score. I look at all those things and think, OK, right, now it makes sense.”

He talks again about the person he loved who contracted the virus and nearly died

of a heart attack. “I couldn’t stop him falling apart,” he says, sadly. And as

we leave the BuzzFeed News office and venture out into Soho, the longstanding

heart of gay London, where generations of gay men have met and had sex and

forged relationships, Owen stops and for the first time seems still. “I spent a

lot of years after that needing to get rid of the guilt.”