Hillary Clinton has received a lot of flak this week for her support of Nancy Regan’s views on AIDS, who basically believed that AIDS was god’s punishment for being gay. Of course she quickly claimed she had ‘made a mistake’.
But about her actual views during the height of the AIDS epidemic?
During the mid 90s, when HRC was in charge of the U.S.’s policies on healthcare, the AIDS epidemic was just starting to spread to the developing world. These countries desperately sought to distribute affordable HIV treatments in order to prevent the epidemic before it even got started. But the Clintons threatened India and South Africa with trade sanctions and completely cut them off from the global economy if they followed through and did that.
To quote Marcia Angell, the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine:
Both the Clinton and Bush administrations carried water for the pharmaceutical industry when Third World countries complained that big pharma was pricing HIV/AIDS drugs out of reach. When the World Trade Organization was formed in 1995, members were required to honor twenty-year patents on drugs. At the time, many countries did not even consider drugs patentable. Exceptions were to be allowed for public health emergencies. (In that case, governments could issue 'compulsory licenses' to have needed drugs produced by other manufacturers.) Poor countries were given until 2005 to comply. It was in this context that in the late 1990s South Africa — desperate to control its HIV/AIDS epidemic — threatened to produce or import generic drugs to fight it. The pharmaceutical industry adamantly opposed any such move and the Clinton administration, no doubt reflecting the industry's influence in Washington, warned of trade sanctions. Subsequently, the administration was so embarrassed by the public outrage that it backed off. A few drug companies, also embarrassed, announced they would lower prices in parts of Africa, but the reality appears to have fallen far short of the promises. Even the discounted drugs are priced higher than generic drugs made in India, and they have been difficult to obtain. [...] The United States is generally seen as siding with drug company interests against the needs of millions of HIV/AIDS victims in the Third World. Source: The Truth About Drug Companies, p. 206
Of course we all know how this played out. There are now over 2 million individuals with HIV in India, and in South Africa almost 19% of the population is infected.
Oh and by the way, HRC and Bill have hit these same pharma companies up for $9.3 million since Bill left office. So despite Hillary’s insistence that she ‘mispoke’, her praise of Nancy Regan is in fact very representative of the ‘help’ that the Clintons have given to individuals with HIV over the years.
