This morning’s New York Times has a comprehensive overview about the state of AIDS in the world today. They state while modern medical advances have made it more manageable, AIDS continues to run rampant and unchecked throughout India and Africa as well as much of the third world.
As in everything else, Bush’s policy on AIDS has been a disaster worldwide. His policies have been based on a moralistic, ideologically-based effort to spread right-wing propaganda disguised as abstinence-only education and junk science. This is unconstitutional because his political policies and political appointments are designed to spread right-wing fundamentalist propaganda.
Listed below are some of the failures of the Bush administration:
The Bush administration routinely denies funding for AIDS groups which fail to state that condoms are ineffective.
The new CDC regulations, published in the Federal Register, are mandatory for any AIDS-fighting organization that receives federal money for HIV prevention, and they finish the job of gutting effective, disease-preventing safe-sex education that has been a goal of the Bush Administration since it took office. Far from trying to “learn” from the Ugandans, the regs demand that any sex-ed “content” include information on the “lack of effectiveness of condom use.” In other words, the Bush Administration wants AIDS-fighting organizations to tell people: Condoms don’t work. At the same time, the regs mandate the teaching of the failed policy of abstinence from sex until (heterosexual) marriage.
The Times article didn’t even mention these new CDC censorship guidelines, or include any comment on Bush’s speech in light of them from Administration critics.They even failed to notice the large and noisy ACT-UP demonstration outside the speech. Dissent wouldn’t have been hard to find: When asked about the CDC regs, Representative Barney Frank told The Nation that “one has to reach back to Stalin and Lysenko to find an ideological distortion of science this complete.” And Representative Henry Waxman called the CDC guidelines “shameful,” and only the latest anti-condom move by an Administration whose policies have been “overwhelmingly suppressing and distorting science” for political purposes (as a sop to the Christian right). (One example: the US coalition with Iraq and Iran to stop the UN from teaching young people about condoms–see Doug Ireland, “U.S. and Evil Axis: Allies for Abstinence,” The Nation, May 16, 2002.)
The CDC is the federal government’s single funder of HIV-prevention work; its current head, Julie Gerberding, is a Bush appointee, named by Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson. The new CDC regulations meticulously define the “content” they censor as including “pamphlets, brochures, fliers, curricula,” “audiovisual materials” and “pictorials (for example, posters and similar educational materials using photographs, slides, drawings or paintings),” as well as “advertising” and web-based info. They not only mandate teaching about condoms’ purported “lack of effectiveness,” they require all such “content” to eliminate anything even vaguely “sexually suggestive” or that might be interpreted as “obscene.” That would, for example, forbid teaching how to use a condom correctly by putting it on a dildo–or even on a cucumber.
Bush has repeatedly lied about the amount of money spent to fight AIDS.
BUSH LIED ABOUT THE AIDS FUNDING HIS ADMINISTRATION IS PROVIDING, AS WELL AS ITS TIMING “Mr. Bush’s other foreign aid initiative, announced in his State of the Union address, is $10 billion in new money to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean over five years. But his budget falls short of that promise. He is proposing only a $550 million increase over the global AIDS money in this year’s spending bill now in Congress. Since the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria would be an effective channel for the aid, there is no excuse for the initiative’s leisurely start. Mr. Bush’s 2004 budget for the Global Fund, $200 million, actually cuts in half what Congress is likely to do in 2003. Mr. Bush has also found part of the money for his AIDS programs by cutting nearly $500 million from child health, including vaccine programs. Child survival is the biggest loser in the foreign aid budget � a scandalous way to finance AIDS initiatives. With the budget dominated by defense spending and huge tax cuts for the wealthy, the White House should not be forcing the babies of Africa to pay for their parents’ AIDS drugs.”
Bush’s plan, called the International Mother and Child HIV Prevention Initiative, earmarks 500 million dollars in bilateral aid over the next two years to cut mother-to-child transmission of HIV by some 40 percent in 12 African countries, plus selected Caribbean programs.
Because the aid will be provided through bilateral channels, rather than via the new Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB (tuberculosis) and Malaria, medications used in the program are certain to be purchased from the patent-holding pharmaceutical companies rather than from firms, many of them in developing countries, that produce generic versions of the same drugs at lower cost.
”The administration is worried that the Global Fund will buy generics and thus damage the interests of the major pharmaceutical companies,” noted Salih Booker, director of Africa Action, a grassroots coalition which played a key role in the anti-apartheid campaign of the 1970s and 1980s.
Bush’s own ex-AIDS czar has criticized his abstinence-based approach:
George W. Bush’s lead negotiator at a 2001 global conference on AIDS came to a follow-up U.N. meeting as a private citizen on Tuesday to challenge the U.S. leader’s current focus on fidelity and abstinence to battle the deadly disease.
The declaration adopted at the 2001 conference, setting out a global strategy against AIDS through 2015, “was a good document and spoke about the need for comprehensive HIV education,” said Scott Evertz, President Bush’s AIDS policy director at the time.
“I honestly don’t know why we now need to insert, through this process, language about abstinence and fidelity,” Evertz, who now works on AIDS issues in the private sector, told Reuters.
Steven Sinding, director general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, told the BBC the Bush administration faced “enormous pressure” to play down the importance of condoms from its “own right wing”.
The administration has a stipulation that 30% of US anti-Aids funds go through faith-based organisations.
“That means that upwards of 30% of money will go to organisations which actively denigrate condoms, or that don’t advocate them,” Mr Sinding said.
Now that the pharmaceutical lobby has let its opposition be known, all eyes are on are Washington. Will the United States try to block the Canadian initiative or water it down-and if so, how?
Canadian officials say they fear that the Bush Administration’s weapon will be the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA permits governments to suspend drug patents if the drugs are “predominantly” for domestic purposes but makes no explicit allowances for exports to other countries.
For the past two years, US trade negotiators have haggled over the details of the WTO drug deal, eventually signing it. If the United States now uses NAFTA to kill or weaken the plan just when promises are turning into medicines, it would be a staggering display of bad faith, even by Bush standards.
Any government considering joining the Free Trade Area of the Americas should be hearing deafening alarm bells right now. The patent protections in the draft FTAA agreement are even tougher than those in NAFTA; if it is adopted, as the Bush Administration hopes, the United States could try to block affordable drug exports anywhere in the Americas. Put simply, the Administration is rigging bilateral and regional trade deals to undermine any attempt by poor countries to exercise their rights in the multilateral sphere.
Bush has appointed people to fight AIDS who have no experience in dealing with the disease:
According to a coalition of campaign groups, Tobias displayed his ignorance of public health by telling the Senate committee that money is “not the problem” in the fight against the pandemic–suggesting that because of the lack of infrastructure in poor countries there was little point in distributing drugs. Tobias was echoing the comment made by the Senate majority leader Bill Frist after an African tour in August. On his return Frist also made the claim that lack of health infrastructure in Africa meant funding by the US government should be scaled back.
The Bush administration has shown no regard for the suffering of individuals, documented below. Instead, they have exploited AIDS as just one more way of unconstitutionally promoting faith-based ideology and lining the pockets of corporate contributors.
From the New York Times, here are some of the stories behind AIDS:
Joan Vileno, NY nurse:
In the early 1980’s, Ms. Vileno held the hands of angry, terrified and scorned patients, mostly intravenous drug users. They were admitted with lethal infections, rarely seen today, that left them gasping for breath, covered with cancerous lesions, blind, demented and wasted to skin and bones.
Her hospital was the only home hundreds of AIDS patients knew as they were shunned by friends and family. Furthermore, funeral directors would not handle their bodies after they died for fear of becoming infected themselves.
Lisa Mysnik, Atlanta mother:
Three years ago, her boyfriend tested positive for the virus while in prison. The staff made him call all his sexual partners to warn them about their own risk. When he phoned Ms. Mysnyk, he said he had something to tell her, but he could not seem to get it out. She finally heard the news from a prison nurse.
Her boyfriend called two other women that day, both of them younger than Ms. Mysnyk, who was 34.
While she waited for her test results, Ms. Mysnyk, a single mother of two young sons, told the doctor, “If I didn’t have the Lord by my side, I’d be a nervous wreck right now.”
When the doctor told her she had H.I.V., Ms. Mysnyk started to cry. Her doctor cried with her.
A few days later, she taught her younger son, who was 7 at the time, how to use a condom. She had a no-nonsense conversation with her 14-year-old about sexually transmitted diseases. “I didn’t want him to ever have to be afraid,” she said.
She is one of millions of reasons why we need comprehensive sex education.
Mrs. Shah, India prostitute:
Since childhood, she has walked on a path leading, with ever greater inevitably, to AIDS. At 13, she was forcibly married to a 35-year-old who kicked her out when she complained of his infidelities. Days later, a woman found her on the platform of a Bombay train station and offered to find her a job as a maid. By evening, she had been sold to a brothel for 10,000 rupees, $220 today.
Once, she said, a customer became a lover, married her and took her away. When he needed money, though, she was back on the street. She protested, and he stabbed her in the cheek and back, burned her with kerosene on the belly and legs and shaved her hip-length black hair down to the scalp.
Two years ago, a test found her H.I.V. positive. “I went crazy,” she said. She drank and took pills, trying to kill herself. Then social workers approached her, looking for prostitutes to educate about AIDS.
“I had an idea,” she said over a cup of tea, “that what happened to me, I would not let happen to other girls.”
Paul Volberding, SF doctor:
Because established physicians lacked the time and often the inclination to take on what was known as the gay disease, the field was wide open [in 1981]. At 31 and with a staff of one (himself), Dr. Volberding opened one of the first clinics anywhere for people with the disease. A year later, with assistance, he began conducting small clinical trials.
He also mentions that strangers would routinely accost him to see if he had any miracle cures when the disease first broke out.
Lawrence Mass, Greenwich pioneer:
In early 1981, Dr. Mass, then 34, had heard fragments of rumors about strange health problems cropping up in Lower Manhattan, especially among gay men. He found Dr. Steve Phillips, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was following the new mystery. Based on his conversation with Dr. Phillips, Dr. Mass wrote a short article about “rumors that an exotic new disease had hit the gay community.”
He wrote one of the first-ever articles about AIDS back in 1981 for The New York Native, a tiny gay weekly.
Provincetown, MA gay community comes together.
It was common to see men with lesions walking in and out of the shops, bookstores and restaurants that line the town’s main street, struggling to breathe the salt air, said Mr. Critchley, an artist and massage therapist. Asking someone if he had lost weight was taboo; it meant asking if he was sick. Friends made sure to stay in close contact, because those who fell out of touch were usually dying.
The town’s gay residents drew together and cared for the sick. Many went house to house, making sure they were comfortable, safe, well fed. Still, no one understood the provenance of the suffering, and when investigators from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came to town on a fact-finding mission, many gay men simply assumed that they, too, would get sick and die quickly.
Here are 10 different policy proposals we on the left should advocate for. However, just as importantly, we need to end the Iraq War as soon as possible; it continues to hamper funding for badly-needed projects:
1. Comprehensive sex-ed:
It is not OK to use condoms some of the time; people must use them all of the time during sexual contact. Study after study has shown that comprehensive sex-ed has reduced the incidence of AIDS and other STD’s. It is a myth that condoms will encourage promiscuity; in fact, married couples may want to know this information to avoid pregnancy and STD’s.
2. More vaccine funding:
We need to reject the ideology of the right and aggressively search for a cure and a vaccine for AIDS. We need to pass some of the savings we get from stopping the Iraq War into an aggressive search for AIDS treatment.
3. Lift ban on funding comprehensive sex-ed programs abroad:
We should not base our funding decisions on ideology. We should base our funding on programs that work, as determined by mainstream scientific research regardless of religious or political affiliation or lack thereof.
4. Defeat anti-gay initiatives and fight stigmas:
As long as we as a society continue to stigmatize gays, we will wind up creating a McCarthy-style climate of fear in which people with AIDS will be looked on with fear regardless of whether they are gay or not.
5. Identify and prosecute AIDS discrimination:
Despite laws against AIDS discrimination, it is alive and well. Advances in medicine mean that many people can live normal lives with the disease.
6. Universal Health Care:
Many AIDS patients are unable to pay for their drugs and health insurance. We need univsersal health care that pays for prescription drugs so that patients do not have to worry about where their next paycheck will come from.
7. Protect reproductive rights:
Many pregnant women with AIDS must choose between feeding another mouth — and perhaps pay for AIDS treatments as well — and caring for their condition. Laws like South Dakota’s that ban abortion in most cases would create extreme financial hardships for these women.
8. Fund the UN Global Fund:
As mentioned above, they purchase generic drugs at a fraction of the cost as opposed to brand-name drugs that are much more expensive.
9. Eliminate requirements for faith-based funding:
The current purpose of the Bush administration is to propagate religious propaganda under the guise of AIDS funding. Our constitution prohibits the establishment of religion and the use of governmental funding to promote religious beliefs. We should base our funding decisions on sound science and not on some kind of religious litmus test.
10. Fight all future appointments of people not qualified to handle AIDS.
Bush rarely appoints for competence; however, he frequently appoints only for loyalty to him.
