Partisan politics derail AIDS aid

During his State of the Union Address last year, President Bush
pledged $15 billion for AIDS relief abroad. With nearly 40 million
people infected with the disease across the globe, the bill could
hardly be better timed or more welcome.

But while the administration’s intentions may have been
laudable, the actions taken hardly resemble the promises made and
do not show signs of improving.

Despite the president’s eagerness to talk about the
policy, surprisingly little has been done to implement it. It took
13 months for any of the money to be allocated ““ a staggering
amount of time considering 3 million people died of AIDS during
that period. Worse, the amount that was finally doled out totaled a
meager $350 million, a mere shadow of the promised $15 billion.

Moreover, the money from the president’s bill comes with
strict rules dictating where and how it must be spent. The most
troubling of these rules is one stipulating that at least 30
percent of the funds must go to faith-based organizations preaching
an abstinence-only approach to HIV containment. Bush has made this
decision despite objections from activists, doctors and
organizations everywhere.

The justification for this policy lies in imitating Uganda,
which has pursued one of the most aggressive anti-AIDS policies in
Africa with huge success. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s
approach emphasized AIDS education, including education about
abstinence.

Despite Uganda’s breakthrough, Bush’s strategy of
denying even the possibility of contraception to a large percentage
of those he is “trying to help” is not only naive but
dangerous. No matter how good the abstinence education, you cannot
ignore that the vast majority of the people in Africa become
sexually active at a young age, many times not by choice.

Choosing policies that explicitly favor ignorance instead of a
more comprehensive approach to sexual education will only lead to a
greater risk of HIV infection when abstinence inevitably fails.

To say that Bush is making bad decisions, though, is not to say
that there are not logical, politically motivated reasons behind
these decisions. To tout contraception as an effective means of
combating AIDS, no matter how true or necessary, would alienate the
evangelical Christian base Bush relied on so heavily to win the
last election, a sacrifice he was unwilling and unable to make.

The repercussions of such a change of opinion are ever-present.
Even suggesting that condoms may help prevent the spread of AIDS in
a campaign speech in Philadelphia provoked a sharp backlash from
Christian activists.

President Bush’s hard-line stance on birth control has had
an additional impact on the fight against AIDS. His reinstatement
of the “global gag rule” ““ dictating that
non-government organizations must not breathe the word abortion if
they want to receive American money ““ has forced local family
planning groups and organizations like the International Planned
Parenthood Federation to shut down some of their locations, denying
critical low-cost health care to thousands of communities.

This means that in Ghana, for example, 700,000 clients are
losing access to HIV counseling and testing, and clinics all over
sub-Saharan Africa essential to tackling HIV are being shut down
for lack of funding.

Another disconcerting aspect of the bill is that it has yet to
specify whether Washington will buy anti-AIDS drugs from generic
producers based mostly in developing countries or brand-name
producers based mostly in the United States.

Despite the assertions coming from Bush’s global AIDS
coordinator, Randall Tobias, that brand-name drugs are dropping
their prices, key brand-name anti-retroviral drug treatments remain
four times more expensive than their generic counterparts endorsed
by the World Health Organization.

The issue is made more complicated by the fact that Tobias
happens to be the former chairman and chief executive of
pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. Conflict of interest? Possibly.
Members of the Bush administration do not have a particularly good
track record of breaking their former business ties after taking
office (Cheney’s lingering flirtation with Halliburton) so it
remains to be seen whether the interests of large corporations or
dying children will win this round.

Bush’s AIDS bill started out with the potential to do a
lot of good. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the influence of big
business and the Christian right have all but destroyed this
potential, leaving the millions of people dying of AIDS abroad
still seeking the help they so desperately need.

It leaves you wondering what, if anything, will force people to
put aside their party politics to make a substantive change for the
greater good.

Mangold is a fifth”“year political science
student.