Press room ... 1999 archive

AIDS Battle Worth Its Cost

December 1, 1999

San Francisco, CA—Whether the crisis involved oil supplies and the sovereignty of Kuwait, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, or machete rebellions in Africa, the United States and its allies have shown that they will spare no expense to confront today’s sources of death and destruction.

Untold billions have been spent in the last decade alone on weapons, supplies and personnel in the name of an end to genocide and the support of property rights.

Today, another murderous and genocidal killer is on the loose. The swath of death is not confined to a single nation. It is spread across the wide plains and cities of Africa, the crowded urban centers of India, throughout the burgeoning populations of Asia and South America and, with growing intensity, in the remnants of the old Soviet empire. Millions are killed each year, and it’s getting worse.

This time the culprit is not a madman or his armies. Instead, it is perhaps the most devious and destructive microbe ever seen on this planet, and it is known as HIV, the virus that slowly but inexorably causes AIDS.

What are the United States, NATO and the developed nations doing about this killer? Surely, something so destructive must be the target of a massive counteroffensive. Hardly. There is no global battle plan, no assembled armies of doctors, no “smart” therapeutic weapons programmed to fly through the killer’s defenses. The partial solutions already employed in the Western nations are a dream for most HIV-infected people worldwide.

Treatments that cost as little as $4 per day could halt the spread of infection from pregnant women to their newborns, a critical place to begin this war. Yet these treatments remain unavailable. Expensive drugs that can dramatically slow the progress of the disease cannot be delivered at prices consistent with the profit goals of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry.

Even if such drugs were miraculously made available free of charge, the hardest hit countries lack the most basic infrastructure for using them. For many, a glass of clean water and an aspirin remain unthinkable luxuries.

Progress can only begin when the Western nations acknowledge that the threat from AIDS is as great or greater than the other threats currently facing them. Clearly, they don’t yet see it that way. If millions of deaths per year aren’t enough to wake world leaders up, how many will be? Tens of millions? Hundreds of millions?

We cannot just wait until a vaccine becomes available. Even if we had a vaccine, it would take a generation before its effects will be felt. As they do when planning wars against mad dictators or plotting world economic policy, leaders of the developed nations must meet now to develop a truly global strategy against AIDS. They must commit billions of dollars, just as they do when lives, oil supplies, or private property are threatened.

They—we—must shoulder the responsibility to build infrastructure, to fund prevention and to stop mother-to-child transmission, and to begin delivering treatment across the globe. They—world leaders—must recognize that their first line of duty in a worldwide pandemic is to protect the right to live, and that this must take priority over protecting the profit margins of the pharmaceutical industry.

On this last World AIDS Day of the decade today, the world’s leaders are long overdue to start designing and implementing their plans. Surely, this would not be the case if oil rights or politically motivated genocide were driving their actions.