An effort by 18 Senators led by New York Junior Senator Kirsten Gillibrand seeks to immunize the Global AIDS funding from cuts threatened by the impending showdown over the national budget and deficit committee.
The letter is signed by Kirsten Gillibrand, Richard Durbin (D-NY), Barbara Milkulski (D-MD), Daniel Akaka (D-HI), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Ron Wyden D-OR), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Charles Schumer (D-NY), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Bernard Sanders (I-VT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Tom Udall (D-NM), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Christopher Coons (D-DE).
The letter PDF is embedded at right, and is linked here.
Addressed to Senate Appropriations committee Chairman Daniel Inouye and and Ranking member Thad Cochran the letter says in part:
"We are writing to request you fund the President's Emergancy Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) bilateral programs, as well as the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria at the President's budget request for Fiscal Year 2012. We also request that your continue a specific specific appropriations line for global HIV/AIDS funding. This level of funding would allow the United States to take advantage of crucial new opportunities to halt the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Sustained funding for PEPFAR, the Global Fund, and other parts of the Global Health Initiative is urgently needed. These critical programs not only save millions of lives, but also help foster economic and political stability on a global scale. US investment in HIV/AIDS and global health programs strengthens our national security and helps safeguard the health of Americans."
The Columbia Spectator (college paper of Columbia University) has more on the effort to prompt the Senators to take this public stand:
A Columbia student group is extending a helping hand to people with AIDS in the community—and achieving national results.
Members of the Student Global AIDS Campaign hosted a call-in last weekend to get senators to agree to protest cuts in global health funding, and 18 senators eventually signed a letter that will be delivered to the House Committee on Appropriations.
Thirteen senators had signed the letter by last Friday, but New York’s Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who has spoken directly with SGAC, extended the deadline to Monday. Members of SGAC reached outside of their group to get more people to call their senators, and by Monday night, the number of senator signatures had increased to 18.
Mel Meder, BC ’14 and member of SGAC, said that young activists had gone to Gillibrand’s events and personally campaigned for her attention.
“It was the result of youth activists that she agreed to send it out,” Meder said of Gillibrand.
Protecting Global AIDS funding has become a real mission on many college campuses. In August, I had an occasion to witness some of these young activists in action. I attended a community question and answer session with Senator Gillibrand. After a period of speaking, the Senator took questions.
A young man was called upon, Michael Tikili of Health GAP. He clearly arrived with an agenda. He had a short question written out on a sheet of paper. It provided a brief summary of the situation with Global AIDS funding, and concluded with a simple request:
“Senator Gillibrand, will you commit to sending a ‘Dear Colleagues’ letter?”
Senator Gillibrand’s answer was succinct and unqualified:
“Yes, I will.”
She went on to say, "that person collecting your information is a staffer, we'll be following up." Indeed, they clearly have.
Within hours the activists from Global Health Gap had tweeted the news of their victory.
I’ve been proud of my junior Senator on many occasions since her appointment. This episode gave me faith government can be responsive to the people. That her office has now followed through on that promise to lobby her colleagues on this issue is a great testament to her leadership skills and commitment to seeing government serve the most vulnerable.
A Modest Request
The call by the Senators to hold the line to the White House budget appropriation request is in fact, a very modest request by HIV activists standards.
In a better world, we'd be funding this at a much higher level. The increase in funding the Obama administration has requested is small considering the ever-increasing need. The administration has already faced criticism for appropriations requests that essentially flatline global funding and, in fact, faced hecklers in the past over the issue. And to put this in some perspective, it appears that Obama's requested increase in funding is the smallest ever. The LA Times has called the admin's funding "weak," and in 2010, Bishop Desmond Tutu called it "distressing" in the New York Times, saying "scaling back America’s financial commitments to AIDS programs could wipe away decades of progress in Africa." (See also these posts at ScienceSpeaks, Colorlines, or Healthgap's assessments here and here.)
Just Tuesday, Desmond Tutu revisited his concerns about Global AIDS funding in the Washington Post op-ed saying, "An end to AIDS is within our reach."
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last month has demonstrated that antiretroviral treatment can prevent the spread of HIV, in addition to saving those infected from sickness and death.
Armed with this new data, President Obama should lead the world in a massive effort to expand access to treatment and rid humanity of AIDS — the most devastating disease of our time.
But just as the end of AIDS has finally come within reach, we are witnessing an unprecedented drop in financial and political support for the cause.
The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS and the Kaiser Family Foundation reported in August that donor funding for HIV/AIDS leveled in 2009 and then declined — 10 percent — in 2010 for the first time ever. The United States, which accounts for more than half of global contributions to fight the disease, disbursed $700 million less in 2010 than in 2009. And projected U.S. funding in 2011 is roughly $28 million less than in 2010.
This is a great shame, as millions of people receiving treatment worldwide depend on these funds to stay alive.
The antiretroviral drugs these funds provide have been proven to effective not only at treating HIV and AIDS, but preventing infection. From the
Yale Daily News:
About one-third of PEPFAR funding has gone to anti-retroviral drugs, which Ezekiel Emanuel has criticized as being more expensive than preventing new infections. But Mugyenyi emphasized that treatment can play a role in prevention, if it is accompanied by preventative techniques such as circumcision. In one study of couples in which one partner is HIV-positive and the other is HIV-negative, there was a 100 percent reduction in transmission if the infected partner used antiretrovirals.
Balancing our national budget at the expense of global health is not only a cruel path to take, it will ultimately prove to be penny-wise and pound foolish endeavor. The AIDS crisis is far from over, both globally and domestically, such choices must be headed off before they can take root.