Call Senators & demand $2 billion for the Global AIDS Fund!
Bipartisan Consensus: Global AIDS Catastrophe is Low Priority - from Health Gap Coalition

In the capital of Zimbabwe, city morgues have been operating 24 hours a day to receive the dead. Running out of burial space, the Harare City Council has requested that citizens bury their loved ones deep enough that there will be room to bury the next family member's casket above them. Escalating infection rates have lead to untold human suffering, preying most heavily on Africa and Asia. The economy and industry of entire nations are being destabilized by massive waves of death sweeping away working people. Entire regions are being depopulated, leaving countries made increasingly of orphans and the elderly. The spiraling destabilization will impact even rich countries.

At times it feels like there is no way to stop the death toll from AIDS. But meaningful assistance from wealthy countries can dramatically increase access to medication and care that has made AIDS a chronic manageable disease in the United States.

After years of worldwide activist campaigning, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan launched the Global AIDS and Health Fund at an OAU Summit in Nigeria on April 26. An international fund to treat and prevent AIDS, TB, and malaria is a long overdue attempt to bring vital resources to address the plague that threatens to erase many parts of the South.

International health experts have produced data demonstrating that only $9.2 billion is needed to provide access to health care facilities, medicine, and large scale prevention programs needed to stop the spiraling AIDS emergency engulfing the planet.

This spring, President Bush announced the first contribution to the fund of $200 million (of redirected existing spending) for 2002. By setting the bar so low, momentum was dramatically slowed internationally. Major donors scaled back contributions.

After assuming control of the Senate, Democrats are not contributing meaningful dollars either. Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy authored a foreign operations budget with less money for the Global Fund than President Bush!

Compassion matched with action from wealthy countries contributing meaningfully to the Global AIDS Fund will reduce the rate of new infections and create a bridge to survival for the 95% of the world with no access to medicine. If wealthy countries turn their back, almost all of the 30 million people living with AIDS will die.

"The problem is not lack of money — many institutions and some individuals could write a check for the entire amount required from all countries in the world — but lack of political will. In the U.S., we are hearing from political experts that the biggest problem is not policy disagreements about what to do about global AIDS, but rather that global AIDS is not a priority for either political party‹simply because Congress is not hearing from constituents that this is a problem for them. These experts tell us that if Congress got 10,000 calls or letters per month expressing concern about the global AIDS epidemic and other infectious diseases, the entire situation would be transformed." - John James, editor, AIDS Treatment News

Our elected leaders must hear from us before they will change their priorities.

ACT NOW!! CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.
WAVES OF SUSTAINED GRASSROOTS ACTION NEEDED!

STRATEGY: The global AIDS fund does not have real opponents; it simply does not have enough champions. In order to change the priorities of the US Government, we must show broad and sustained support fir the Fund this summer and fall, using phone calls, letters, and visits. Activists have set a goal of thousands of calls in waves during August, September and October.

Visit, call and write both of your Senators, AND Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. During the month of August, the Senate is on recess. That means they will be in their home office.

1. August 20 ­ August 24: contact the Senators at their home offices ‹ contact them as often as possible!

PLEASE CONTACT BOTH SENATOR'S HOME OFFICES: check www.vote-smart.org/vote-smart/data.phtml for contact information.

ALSO call and write Tom Daschle: 320 North Main, POBox 1274, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 57101 tel: (605) 334 9596

It is extremely useful and often not very hard during recess to meet the Senator in-person. The sooner you or your organization make the meeting request, the better.

E-mails to congress are not usually counted.

2. September 10-14 AND October 8-12: flood the Senate with calls and letters. Call more than once!

CALL BOTH OF YOUR SENATORS in DC: 202.224.2131 is the Congressional Switchboard. The operators will connect you.

CALL Tom Daschle: tel. 202.224.2321 o fax 202.224.2047

Senate mailing address: Honorable [name], US Senate, Washington DC, 20510

ASK FOR action and compassion in the face of a cataclysm: $2 billion new dollars for the Global AIDS and Health Fund now!

BACKGROUND:
Why focus on the Senate? The House has requested at least as much money as President Bush. A substantial number of House Republicans have already voted for a much larger contribution to the fund. Senate Democrats, while not opposed to the fund, are not paying much attention. If not corrected, this will have very negative results when the House and Senate resolve and combine several different global AIDS bill in a conference committee as early as the beginning of October. In preparation for these Œend-game' budget negotiations, it is critical that the Senate comes to the table with a large number, rather than the smallest!

Calls to Senate leaders on this issue or in positions of leadership are extremely useful. Target Senators Daschle (SD), Leahy (VT), Kerry (MA), Frist (TN), Helms (NC), Biden (DE). Calls to one's own senators at this juncture are critical.

Aren't AIDS drugs too complex to take properly in poor countries? It is extremely uncommon for a person with HIV starting therapy to be required to take complex pills regimens with difficult food restrictions. Most patients starting treatment now simply take 1-3 pills in the morning and 1-3 pills in the evening. Data indicates that regimen adherence rates are comparable between the United States, Côte d'Ivoire and Brazil.

How can we get lab tests and pills to 30 million people? New treatment guidelines in the U.S. encourage people with HIV to delay starting therapy until they are at a higher risk of illness, measured by symptoms or low T-cell counts. Therefore, it is estimated that only 5-6 million of the world's 30 million people with HIV/AIDS are in need of treatment at any given moment, and that disease management can be tied to symptoms rather than lab tests.

Why not wait till next year? The governance and priorities of the fund are being established now, and are being established in the context of inadequate political commitment from rich nations. Under a storm of worldwide criticism, President Bush and Secretary Powell have indicated that more money will be made available for the fund next year, if the fund performs acceptably. However, by setting the bar so low at the outset, the fund is being starved of resources before it starts. Policy makers have used the shortage of capital as grounds to argue against purchasing affordable generics or providing treatment at all ‹ choosing instead to focus solely on prevention.

A global response to disaster should not be designed to fail or be hobbled at the outset. It must never be acceptable for the world's wealthiest countries to offer only spare change in the face of a human calamity unprecedented in history. It is not Œtoo late' this year.

Treatment or prevention? Treatment access is a key component of a comprehensive prevention program. Access to treatment stimulates dialog about HIV and access to testing. Prevention services plateau at a low level of effectiveness without access to treatment. There is little incentive to seek HIV testing if the only possible result is a death sentence.

Aren't AIDS drugs too expensive? Generic competition from high quality manufacturers has been shown to dramatically bring down the cost of medicine. But the Bush Administration is objecting to the use of affordable WTO-legal generic medicines, or even funding large-scale purchasing programs that could negotiate for best prices or issue competitive bids. These kinds of objections are why activists have pushed for an inter-nationally administered fund, less subject to the political whims of the donors. In June during meetings of the WTO's TRIPS Council, the Bush Administration strongly opposed a request from over 60 countries ­ almost every nation present, rich or poor-­ to reform international drug monopoly laws to create more affordable medicines for poor countries that are being destroyed by AIDS.

In the United States, drug company monopolies on the products of publicly funded research result in drug costs of $10,000 to $18,000 per person with HIV per year. Legal generic manufacturers in Brazil, Canada, India, and Thailand have brought the costs of a year's supply of triple combination therapy treatment down to as little as $350. With the economies of scale that could come from large-scale purchase and manufacture due to donations from the Global Fund and other resources, we are told by manufacturers and governments that drug costs could decrease to less than $200 per person per year.

Patents have one purpose: to protect high prices. Drug companies sometimes talk about the need to protect profit incentives in order to spur research and development. While most AIDS drugs are invented at substantial U.S. taxpayer expense, there is very little profit for the pharmaceutical industry to be made or lost in the global South. Africa accounts for 1.3% of the global pharmaceutical market.

Why an international fund? SCALE: Single-nation controlled funds were not able to attract the significant contributions needed to provide medicine and care to the 30 million people with AIDS with no access to medicine. Almost entirely prevention-focused bilateral efforts have not been large enough to mount the scale of prevention programs needed to staunch new infections. POLITICAL FREEDOM: An international response not owned by a single country is needed to break outside of the political considerations of donors. For instance, a multilateral fund program reduces the influence of pharmaceutical companies opposed to the purchase of high quality, affordable WTO-legal generic medicines. ADDITIONALITY: While the global fund will be able to serve many functions that bilateral aid programs cannot, it is important that contributions to the Global AIDS and Health Fund are in addition to funds administered by USAID. SPEED: A new, nimble entity is being created to ensure that the fund is fast-moving and not subject to the bureaucratic delays associated with United Nations or USAID programs.

article from AIDS Treatment News

Global Epidemic, U.S. Response: A Winning Strategy and What You Can Do
How to change the lack of political will now blocking worldwide AIDS control.
by John S. James

World consciousness on the HIV epidemic in developing countries‹about 90% of the global epidemic‹has changed greatly in the last three years. In 1998 the World AIDS Conference in Geneva took the theme "Bridging the Gap" meaning the gap between access to treatment in rich and poor countries. But outside the conference there was no institutional support for saving lives in poor countries; once the speeches were done, that was it. And we all knew it.

Now it is no longer OK to let tens of millions of people die without treatment when treatment is available. And especially since the XIII International AIDS Conference last summer in Durban, South Africa, real changes have begun. Prices of antiretrovirals have been reduced up to 90% in some poor countries ‹ either by generic manufacturers, or by major pharmaceutical companies trying to head them off. Treatment is now widely recognized as an important part of HIV prevention and control, especially since it gives people incentive to get tested and work with the public-health system. (With no chance of treatment, they have the opposite incentives.)

The big problem now is funding. Even with the price reductions many countries cannot pay for the necessary prevention and treatment programs without help. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan proposed a global fund of $7 to $10 billion per year to control HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria; economists agree that the money is available, and health experts agree that if well spent, it could do the job. Yet the Global AIDS and Health Fund is going to start with only a fraction of the amount required ‹ and even that includes one-time contributions, multi-year contributions all counted in a single year, and money already being spent on AIDS that has been redirected or renamed to make the Fund look bigger. (For current pledge totals to the Global AIDS and Health Fund, see http://www.un.org/News/ossg/aids.htm)

The problem is not lack of money‹many institutions and some individuals could write a check for the entire amount required from all countries in the world‹but lack of political will. In the U.S., we are hearing from political experts that the biggest problem is not policy disagreements about what to do about global AIDS, but rather that global AIDS is not a priority for either political party‹simply because Congress is not hearing from constituents that this is a problem for them. These experts tell us that if Congress received 10,000 calls or letters per month expressing concern about the global AIDS epidemic and other infections diseases, the entire situation would be transformed.

That's about one call or letter per month for every 25,000 people in the United States‹to entirely change our country's response to the greatest epidemic of modern times. And it would change much of the world's response as well. If the world's only superpower takes global AIDS seriously, many other countries will also.

So why hasn't it happened already?
A big part of the problem has been the lack of good legislative vehicles (such as bills or amendments) for expressing concern‹ or rather, the lack of knowledge about how to use the vehicles that do exist. With the way Congress works, letters and phone calls should target actual legislation or other decisions in front of Congress at the time; otherwise they may never be counted, because the office staff will probably not categorize, total, and report them, among the many thousands of communications that come in to each Congressional office.

To overcome this problem, advocates and the public alike must understand that what is most important is that Congress knows the public it represents does care about AIDS and other epidemics in developing countries. So even if specific legislation fails, or is flawed, or was not introduced in a politically astute way, your call or letter is still important because it adds up to the 10,000 communications per month that Congress needs to get from throughout the U.S.‹to know that people in their district care about the global epidemic (and therefore they need to care about it as well, and act accordingly).

When you write or call it helps to know that you are not trying to change anyone's position (the Senator or Representative and their advisers and office staff probably agree with you already), but to let them know you care about the issue, and want them to give it the priority it deserves. You don't need to debate or make technical arguments. Political organizers can miss this reality because they are used to controversial issues where the most important part of a call or letter is where it makes clear which side the writer takes. Here it's not an question of sides, but of priority. Political organizations can also miss the point because usually their main goal is to pass or block specific legislation or other policies‹while the main goal here is cumulative impact on prioritizing the issue.

Also, lobbyists may find it hard to work on both domestic and international AIDS; but for the public, calls or letters to Congress or the White House on each of these add to the total momentum on AIDS, and health, increasing the priority (the political will) on both U.S. and international AIDS.

Next steps
In August, September, and October of this year international AIDS will come before Congress many times, as the new Global AIDS and Health Fund begins. Many AIDS organizations will put out action alerts when calls or letters are needed. Remember that what often counts most is letting Congress know you care about international AIDS, rather than the particulars of the legislation or amendment at issue.

We believe that a winning strategy is to use each appropriate piece of legislation to build cumulative momentum on this issue. Can we organize friendly contests on who can get the most communications from constituents to Congress (and/or to the White House)?

Every U.S. citizen can contribute substantially to better worldwide control of AIDS and other infectious diseases‹saving millions of lives, contributing to the safety of our country, and improving the quality of life for everyone. A few hundred committed, determined activists‹with the widespread community support they already have‹would be more than enough to do it.

Better political mobilization would help. We see action alerts with no date, with misspellings, or with no indication of whether they are still current. Or the action alerts are hard to find on a Web site. Some alerts send users only to an automated email response, without justifying whether those emails are effective (despite widespread doubt that Congress listens to email).

Some give little guidance‹for example, urging readers to write the Treasury Department with no further details. None seems to have benefited from simple focus groups that ask supporters not familiar with writing Congress, etc. to relate what questions and obstacles come up as they try to respond to the alert. And many apparently lack a winning legislative strategy‹or if they do have one, they conceal it well from readers.

Years ago we noted the bad state of AIDS action alerts and grassroots organizing. Much of the problem stemmed from the ambivalence of inside-the-Beltway organizations toward grass-roots action: they needed it to be effective, but were threatened by it as well. The community still urgently need organizers who define grassroots as their mission, and learn do it well.

The epidemic will not wait for perfect organization, and neither can we. Determined individuals throughout the country can use the information available (and insist on better information when necessary) to make sure the U.S. and other governments respond seriously to the worldwide epidemic ‹ not only in rhetoric, but in resources as well.

John S. James
AIDS Treatment News
http://www.aidsnews.org

This page provides ways of contacting your representatives. Action Alerts are posted on the National Association of People With AIDS site. Check out the AIDS Action Council for articles on current research and action alerts. Alerts also posted on ACT UP New York.

home

write to: webman@aidsinfonyc.org
copyright © 2001 aidsinfonyc.org