The Bush AIDS Machine

[rodeodance]

a few old--but a potent article.


http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041220&s=kaplan

comment | Posted December 2, 2004

The Bush AIDS Machine
by Esther Kaplan


Four more years of AIDS under George W. Bush doesn't add up to four more years of complacency and denial, as it did when Ronald Reagan won re-election in 1984. That's because midway through his first term Bush did something Reagan never dreamed of: He made AIDS his own. No more tawdry talk of gay men and drug users, condoms and clean needles; by abandoning the domestic for the international, Bush rewrote AIDS as a story about orphans, abstinence and faith. Unilateralism, corporatism--Bush found a home for these first principles, too, in his $15 billion global AIDS initiative, which is US-run and Pharma-friendly. ........


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Meanwhile, Bush's neglect of the domestic epidemic has borne fruit. New data show that the government is set to fail at its 2001 goal to cut new domestic HIV infections in half by 2005. Far from declining, HIV infections plateaued at 40,000 a year during 2002 and 2003; this year, documented HIV diagnoses actually rose. Could we be seeing the impact of Bush's disinvestment in proven approaches to HIV prevention, while hundreds of millions go to abstinence-only programs that can mention condoms only in terms of their failure rates? On the treatment front, in May an Institute of Medicine report calculated that tens of thousands of Americans living with HIV aren't getting needed treatment--the result of state cuts to Medicaid and the chronic flat funding of the Ryan White Act.

A climate of fear now prevails among AIDS service organizations, most of which depend on government grants to offer HIV prevention and care. Many have been the targets of punitive financial investigations under Bush; all now face a censorious new approval process for sexually explicit prevention materials. At the moment, most AIDS lobbyists are hoping only to hold the line in the years ahead: to get Ryan White reauthorized without significant cuts, to keep cash flowing to the Global Fund, to stave off increases to the abstinence-only pot.

Will they shake off their fear and engage in a resurgent AIDS activism? Perhaps. Their hand will certainly be strengthened if African leaders publicly protest the "morality"-based strictures attached to Bush's largesse; if people with AIDS in red states start to raise their voices when they're cut off from care; and if the media pick up on mounting scientific evidence that virginity programs actually put youth at risk for STDs. It will take a series of eruptions like these to rattle the new Republican AIDS machine.