Washington Blade - November 15, 2002
Lou Chibbaro Jr.

On the day following their Oct. 30 meeting with Margaret Spelling, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, leaders of the same 10 groups attended another unannounced meeting with Tommy Thompson, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. The meeting with Thompson was held at HHS headquarters in Southwest D.C.

Joe O'Neill, the openly gay director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, was the only other administration official to join Spelling at the White House meeting.

"We didn't put out a press release because we wanted to work together on policy, not politics," said Bill Arnold, chair of the AIDS Drug Assistance Program Working Group, which represents people who receive federally subsidized AIDS drugs. Arnold was one of the AIDS advocacy group leaders who attended both meetings.

Arnold said officials with the AIDS groups requested and were granted the meetings with Spelling and Thompson after conferring with one another and concluding that a lack of "effective channels of communication" existed between the Bush administration and the U.S. "AIDS advocacy community."

He said the AIDS group leaders attending the meetings requested a separate meeting with President Bush. According to Arnold, White House officials expressed interest in a future meeting between them and the president but made no commitment to hold such a meeting.

David Harvey, executive director of the AIDS Alliance for Children, Youth & Families, who attended the meeting with Spelling, called the session "very positive and very productive."

"This was the first broad-based meeting between AIDS groups and high level administration officials in Washington," Harvey said.

Arnold said O'Neill has been helpful to the AIDS groups since Bush named him "AIDS czar" in June to replace his openly gay predecessor, Scott Evertz. Administration sources and AIDS activists reported that conservative advocacy groups persuaded the White House to remove Evertz from the AIDS office post after he supported community based groups that used federal funds to pay for controversial, sexually explicit HIV prevention messages. Evertz was transferred to a less visible job as a special assistant to Thompson at HHS, where he works on international AIDS issues.

AIDS czar less visible

Since taking over the White House AIDS office, O'Neill has also been far less visible than Evertz was. Unlike Evertz, O'Neill has made few public appearances at AIDS group functions and reportedly none before gay community groups. Nevertheless, most AIDS activists have called O'Neill, a physician who headed the HHS AIDS policy office before assuming his White House post, as a highly qualified public official.

O'Neill did not return a call for comment by press time.

Arnold and Harvey said the AIDS group leaders were especially pleased that Thompson - at their request - agreed to direct the Food & Drug Administration to accelerate its approval of a new HIV test that provides test results in 20 minutes. Thompson held a press conference on Nov. 7, one week after his Oct. 31 meeting with the AIDS group leaders, to announce that the FDA, an arm of HHS, had approved the so-called "rapid HIV test." (See related story, Page 37)

Among other things, the AIDS group officials called on Spelling and Thompson to push for increased federal funding for the Ryan White AIDS CARE Act program and the AIDS Drug Assistance program, Arnold and Harvey said. The CARE program helps states and cities provide medical and social services to people with AIDS. The ADAP program helps states and D.C. pay for life-prolonging drugs for people with HIV and AIDS.

The AIDS group participants also urged Spelling and Thompson to push for significant funding increases for the CDC's AIDS prevention programs and for international AIDS prevention programs, those attending the meetings said.

A Nov. 8 memo prepared by AIDS group attendees of the meetings says participants also expressed concern to both Spelling and Thompson over the administration's abstinence-only programs for HIV prevention.

The abstinence-only programs, mandated, in part, by an act of Congress, call for teaching teenagers that complete abstinence from sexual activity until marriage is the best and most effective means of preventing AIDS and teen pregnancy. Critics say the programs' ban on discussing condom use denies teenagers, especially gay youth, potentially life-saving HIV prevention information.

Thompson responded, according to the memo, by saying the administration promotes both abstinence and other prevention methods, including the use of condoms, in a wide range of HHS and CDC sponsored programs.

Harvey said participants expressed concern over a decision by the HHS inspector general to initiate financial audits for federally funded AIDS groups that provide HIV prevention programs aimed at gay men.

Critics in Congress have urged HHS to conduct the audits on grounds that some of these groups offer controversial, sexually explicit programs that appear more as social functions than serious AIDS prevention efforts.

Supporters say the sexually explicit prevention methods are needed to reach certain population groups that are at high risk of contracting HIV.

Thompson criticizes protests

Harvey noted that some of the AIDS group leaders met with Thompson in Barcelona earlier this year following an international AIDS conference there.

Thompson agreed to an impromptu meeting with AIDS advocacy group representatives in Barcelona a few hours after representatives of several of the same groups heckled him in a noisy protest at the AIDS conference, preventing the audience from hearing his speech at the session.

The memo says Thompson complained in the Oct. 31 meeting in D.C. that a New York City-based AIDS group, Housing Works, had staged a protest that day against an HHS official in New York. Thompson had been scheduled to accompany the HHS official in New York but cancelled that engagement to meet the AIDS group leaders in D.C.

"I don't understand why we can't have a better dialogue than demonstrating," the memo quoted Thompson as saying. "I want to work with you. We should be able to pool our resources and work together."

Among the officials accompanying Thompson at the meeting were Anthony Fauci, director of AIDS programs at the National Institutes of Health; Scott Evertz, the former White House AIDS office director who currently serves as an assistant to Thompson; and Chris Bates, the D.C. gay and AIDS activist who works as deputy director of the HHS AIDS policy office.

Julie Gerberding, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention; and Harold Jaffe, a CDC official in charge of AIDS prevention programs, participated in the Thompson meeting through a video hookup from their Atlanta offices.

The AIDS group leaders attending the Spelling meeting, in addition to Arnold and Harvey, were Marsha Martin, AIDS Action; Paul Kawata, National AIDS Minority Council; Terje Anderson, National Association of People With AIDS - all from Washington, D.C.; Gene Copello, Florida AIDS Action; Ronald Johnson, Gay Men's Health Crisis of New York City; Pat Bass, CAEAR Coalition, Philadelphia; Ernest Hopkins, San Francisco AIDS Foundation; and Mark Harrington, Treatment Action Group of New York.

Lou Chibbaro Jr. can be reached at lchibbaro@washblade.com.

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