On World AIDS Day, Democrats should start to reverse Bush's deadly AIDS policies.
Bush's Other Losing War: AIDSDoug IrelandDoug Ireland, a veteran political journalist, can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/direland/. Today is World AIDS Day—and it's sad to have to report that, thanks in part to George W. Bush and the Republicans, we are losing the fight against the pandemic. And it's time for the Democrats to repair some of the damage. The world has failed miserably to meet the goals for AIDS prevention education set in 2001 by the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV-AIDS. For example, the U.N. said then that, by 2005, 90 percent of young people were supposed to know how to prevent AIDS—yet, today, the latest U.N. figures show that only 20 percent of young women in the world, and only 30 percent of young men, know how to stop the spread of HIV. That lethal situation is one direct result of Republican legislative earmarks and Bush policy restrictions that are shifting funds away from science-based sex education to "abstinence-only" sex-ed programs. A March 2006 Government Accountability Office report showed that restrictions on AIDS prevention funding in the original legislation for the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief—restrictions imposed by the Republicans at the demand of the anti-condom Christian Right—were undermining AIDS education and prevention. Take the example of Uganda, where some 32 million quality-approved condoms remain impounded in government warehouses while the U.S. government ramps up financing for abstinence-only approaches to HIV prevention. Religious groups, to whom U.S. AIDS-fighting money has been ladled out as political patronage, are undermining confidence in condoms throughout the country and contributing to misinformation about their effectiveness. The Republican-imposed restrictions on awarding AIDS-fighting dollars are also affecting other countries hard-hit by the AIDS epidemic, such as Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia. The failed fantasy of abstinence-only sex-ed has helped make sub-Saharan Africa—where two-thirds of the world's AIDS cases occur—a killing field. If the new Democratic majority in Congress has any spine or any compassion, it will begin to roll back these anti-science, religiously-inspired Republican restrictions by passing Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee's PATHWAY Act (that stands for Protection Against Transmission of HIV for Women And Youth) when she reintroduces it in January. Lee's bill would strike the PEPFAR earmark requiring that 33 percent of all HIV prevention funding be spent on teaching abstinence-until-marriage as the sole sex education program. And her bill would ensure that all those who are sexually active are taught how to practice safe sex—and that includes using condoms. Another critical problem: The G8 summit meeting in 2005 set a goal of universal access to treatment for AIDS by 2010. Yet the world is woefully far from achieving that goal—again, thanks to the Bush administration, which, behind closed doors, has been sabotaging the ability of the world's poorest countries to produce or buy cheap, generic AIDS medications. Here's the background: In November 2001, after a long fight against the monopolization of AIDS-drug production by Big Pharma, officials at a World Trade Organization meeting in Doha, Qatar, agreed that poor countries should have the right to break the multinational drug companies' patent monopoly if they declared a national AIDS emergency. The U.S. was among the 142 countries signing this breakthrough agreement, under which poor countries could make their own AIDS medications cheaply or buy generic versions from a producing country (like India), thus bypassing Big Pharma. This was a huge victory, won after years of struggle by AIDS and non-governmental public health advocacy organizations around the world. The Doha Declaration began to save thousands of lives, by getting cheap, life-prolonging meds into the hands of HIV-positive people in poorer nations. But the Bush administration has been morbidly blackmailing poor countries into forfeiting their production rights under that Doha treaty if they want so-called "free trade agreements" with the U.S. Either the poor countries refuse to knuckle under and scuttle these bilateral and regional trade deals—worth billions—with Washington, or they accept the deals and raise the price of AIDS medicines beyond the reach of the poor. This unconscionable blackmail has made many countries, including six in Latin America, cede their rights to break the Big Pharma AIDS drug monopoly. The Bush administration has been using its big stick to try to impose these pro-Big Pharma free trade agreements on a raft of poor countries hard hit by AIDS, from Thailand to five sub-Saharan African countries, including Botswana and South Africa. Any country that signs on to the Bush administration's arm-breaking trade deals that sabotage the Doha agreement is condemning millions who need the essential AIDS-fighting drugs, but cannot afford them, to death. Bush and his cronies "began this trade blackmail in 2002, after a group of the largest pharmaceutical companies—headed by Pfizer CEO Hank McKinnell—raised $30 million for the Republicans' congressional campaigns that year," says Jamie Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, the international point man in winning the patent-breaking Doha agreement and an unsung hero in the fight for cheap AIDS meds. The effect of these deals, Love says, is to force poor countries into enacting "superpatents" that prolong U.S. drugmakers' monopolies and sharply limit the conditions under which their AIDS patents can be broken. Though millions of lives are at stake in these sordid and lethal trade deals, so far the Democrats have been silent about them, leaving the Bush administration free to negotiate these murderous agreements at economic gunpoint with little media notice. If the new Democratic congressional majority wants to show it is really serious about the global AIDS fight, and really wants the U.S. to live up to the goals of universal treatment access Washington agreed to at the G8 summit, it should hold vocal public hearings come January on these odiferous free trade agreements and ban their lethal pro-Big Pharma restrictions. That would allow poor countries to make or buy their own life-extending AIDS drugs and get them into the hands of those who so desperately need them. If the Democrats make these two things happen, perhaps on World AIDS Day next year we'll have something to celebrate instead of millions more to mourn. |
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