Newsday - Wednesday, July 10, 2002
Laurie Garrett, Staff Correspondent

"Let's hear about morality, Thompson," a demonstrator shouted. "People are dying because they don't have access to medications!"

About 40 activists blew whistles and shouted, first from the stage, then retreating to the aisles, demanding that the United States play a bigger role in conquering a global problem. They were targeting the level of U.S. contributions to the Global Fund for AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis; the high prices of U.S.-made anti-HIV drugs; and wealthy nations' obligations to help poor nations deal with the AIDS pandemic.

Even leading economists and United Nations officials yesterday called upon the United States to immediately donate $2 billion to $3 billion to the fight and thereby set an example.

The sense of desperation at this meeting has almost shoved science out of the picture. The molecular biologists do not dominate discussion; the macroeconomists and social analysts do.

Worldwide, just under 2 percent of the HIV-infected population has access to the drug cocktails that have brought years of healthy life to Americans and Europeans, according to Monitoring the AIDS Pandemic, a Harvard University-based group.

The reality of what it means to those affected in poor nations was crystallized by World Bank economist Hans Binswanger. Himself HIV-positive, Binswanger is on drug cocktails that keep him healthy. He said he was challenged by a Malawi colleague who asked, "You are well. Could you pay to save one person?"

So, Binswanger said, he took out a second mortgage on his home and subsidized an African child's care. Soon, he realized that the need was in the millions of lives, not one, so he used his World Bank skills to track down potential contributors to help treat around the world AIDS activists whose presence, he reasoned, is needed to keep pressure on their governments.

"I have traveled around the world for a year and a half looking for funds, and I haven't found any, ladies and gentlemen," Binswanger said. "Budgets are limited only when we are not willing to pay! So let's get real when we talk of cost-effectiveness: We are not willing to pay!"

That perception was at the core of protests directed against Thompson. "We have to look at this as one world, one AIDS community," Lynda Dee of AIDS Action Baltimore said in an interview.

Thompson, in the text of his speech, insisted that "no administration in any nation has ever made fighting HIV-AIDS as high a priority as the United States under [the Bush] administration."

Talking with reporters, he expressed exasperation over the criticism. "People won't listen. People don't see all we're doing," he said. "I would think the activists should spend more time pressuring other governments to give money to the Fund. You know how committed I am, and the president is, to this fight."

Several U.S. AIDS activists met privately later with Thompson, though none would discuss the content of the conversation.

In an emotionally charged news conference, Dr. Peter Piot, director of UNAIDS; Richard Feacham, director of the Global Fund; Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs; and Stephen Lewis, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's special envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa, lambasted wealthy nations for failing to meet funding targets.

While the United States has committed more dollars than any other nation, Sachs shouted into a microphone that the U.S. economy constitutes 40 percent of the total gross national product of the wealthy world.

The United States needs to up the ante, he said, so Europe, Japan, Canada and other nations will follow.

"The American shortfall has triggered a shortfall all of the way down the line," Lewis agreed.

During the demonstration against Thompson, former HHS Secretary Louis Sullivan was in the front row. It was Sullivan who was shouted off the stage when he addressed this gathering in San Francisco in 1990, speaking on behalf of the first Bush administration.

"This is ridiculous," he said yesterday, amid the shouting din. "Everybody has a right to protest, but nobody has a right to prevent someone from speaking. That is un-American."
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