Gao was honoured for her work by the United Nations and Western organizations whilst spending time under house arrest.
Her split with the Chinese authorities on the transmission and the seriousness of the AIDS epidemic in the People's Republic of China hindered her further activities, and she left for the United States in 2009, where she settled in Manhattan, New York.
[1][3] Her family, including her five siblings,[1] moved to Kaifeng, Henan during World War II,[1][4] where she attended university to study medicine beginning in 1939.
[1] A professor at the Henan College of Traditional Chinese Medicine,[6] Gao was a medical doctor who specialized in ovarian gynecology;[7] she also worked as an obstetrician, delivering up to "a dozen babies a day".
[5] When famines began to impact the province in the late 1950s, Gao gave food ration tickets and other supplies to patients in need.
[8] Gao became well known in China and worldwide as an advocate for AIDS prevention during the HIV epidemic in the Henan province, as well as her calls on local and national institutions for more attention to people suffering from the disease and children who had been left orphaned after the death of infected parents.
[10][11] Gao suspected that Ba had been infected with HIV due to a blood transfusion several years earlier during an operation on a uterine tumor.
[10] Her flat eventually became a "command center", where she printed leaflets and answered letters and phone calls from patients, doctors, and teachers about HIV/AIDS.
[6] After receiving the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights in 2001, she spent the $20,000 in prize money, supplemented with $10,000 in donations from the Ford Foundation, to print 150,000 copies of the book.
[6] Gao later received requests for the book, primarily from Henan, but also from Hainan, Hubei, Guangdong, Yunnan and the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
[6] Yaojie worked alongside Shuping Wang, a health researcher that had previously called out China's poor practices in blood collection that led to the spread of hepatitis C in 1993, and who had also been a whistleblower on the rise of HIV infection a few years later.
[12] Both officials and local press were also unwilling to help her in her education campaigns, instead covering up the issue, fearing that discussing it would give the province a bad reputation.
[10] Later that year, in November, a lecture Gao was scheduled to give to students was cancelled hours beforehand after she admitted she would be briefly discussing HIV/AIDS.
[4] In 2003, the Chinese government admitted officially that AIDS existed in China and promised funds to prevent and control the disease.
On 16 February 2007, bowing to international pressure, the government gave her permission to travel to the United States to receive an award.
[25] The house arrest of Gao was part of a continuing pattern of harassment, especially in Henan Province, of grassroots AIDS activists in China.
Upon arriving in the United States, she stayed briefly with a Chinese family and then moved to New York with a visiting fellowship from Columbia University.
[1] She worked closely with Columbia University professor Andrew J. Nathan, a scholar of Chinese politics who managed her affairs in the United States.