Clinton Approves AIDS Trust Fund
Lake Placid, N.Y., Aug. 19, 2000 -- A week before his trip to Africa,President Clinton signed a bill today that sets up a globaltrust fund for AIDS victims that has been likened to a kind ofMarshall Plan against the infectious disease—the leading cause ofdeath on the African continent.
The measure, signed in Lake Placid, where Clinton wascelebrating his 54th birthday with his family, creates a World BankAIDS Trust Fund to provide grants for AIDS prevention, care andeducation to countries hardest hit by the disease.
It also authorizes funding for the administration’s fiscal 2001initiatives to fight HIV and AIDS worldwide and strengthens theU.S. response to the pandemic that killed 2.8 million people acrossthe globe last year.
A Threat to Fragile Democracies
The bill includes $300 million for the U.S. Agency forInternational Development to pay for education, voluntary testingand counseling, prevention of mother-to-child transmission and carefor those living with HIV or AIDS.
It also authorizes $50 million in new funding for the GlobalAlliance for Vaccines and Immunization; $10 million for theInternational AIDS Vaccine Initiative; and $60 million to fighttuberculosis—the single largest killer of adults worldwide andthe leading cause of death of those with AIDS.
“Fighting AIDS worldwide is not just the right thing to do,it’s the smart thing. In our tightly connected world, infectiousdisease anywhere is a threat to public health everywhere,” Clintonsaid in his weekly radio address. “AIDS threatens the economies ofthe poorest countries, the stability of friendly nations, thefuture of fragile democracies.”
U.S. Hopes For More Donors
Clinton, who travels to Nigeria and Tanzania next week, isdirecting Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers to begin negotiationswith the World Bank to set up the trust fund.
The bill, passed by Congress last month, authorizes U.S.contributions of $150 million a year for two years. The money isintended as a springboard to bring in up to $1 billion a year frominternational donors. The House had pushed for a $500 million U.S.contribution over five years, but the Senate scaled it back.
The trust fund “represents an extraordinary effort to move withurgency to address the horrific AIDS epidemic,” said Rep. JimLeach, R-Iowa, House sponsor of the bill. “It is our hope andexpectation that the annual contribution from the U.S. willleverage enough contributions from other donors to increase severalfold the size of the trust fund.”
The fund, administered by the U.S. representative to the WorldBank board of trustees, will gather public and private funding tocombat the spread of HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa which has10 percent of the world’s population but 70 percent of the world’sAIDS cases.
Marshall Plan for AIDS
“Some are calling it the Marshall Plan for AIDS,” said SandraThurman, director of the AIDS policy office at the White House,referring to the massive plan for the economic recovery of Europeafter World War II. “We’re looking at a pandemic the likes ofwhich we have never seen.”
AIDS kills 6,000 people a day in Africa and has orphaned some 15percent of children in the worst-affected cities. The UnitedNations has predicted the disease will wipe out half the teen-agepopulation in some poor African countries. By some estimates, thedisease will lower life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa from 59years in the early 1990s to 45 by 2015.
American attention to the AIDS crisis has taken on a newdimension in recent months since the administration declared it anational security threat that could destabilize fragile democraciesand crush economic progress for whole continents.
Five major pharmaceutical companies, responding to complaintsthat new effective AIDS treatments are beyond the reach of millionsof Africans because of high costs, have agreed to make substantialcuts in the price of AIDS drugs for Africa and other developingcountries.