Author: Jonathan White

Speaking Friday evening in Dana Auditorium, Vermont’s Independent Representative, Congressman Bernie Sanders, helped launch the Middlebury Global AIDS Forum.

Sanders told the audience, “The AIDS crisis…is one of the most important concerns facing humanity as we move into the 21st century.” He said that he was “glad” students were holding a forum on the subject because AIDS, he said, is “a huge, huge issue in terms of the number of people affected.”

Sanders’ speech highlighted the role of the media in shaping public awareness of HIV/AIDS, the ability of the United States government to work towards alleviating the crisis, as well as the much needed cooperation of pharmaceutical companies in helping to make medicine available. Sanders criticized all three bodies – the media, government and drug companies – for not doing enough to fight the pandemic.

Sanders emphasized the media’s capability to decide “what is important in the first place, and what is not important.” He said that President George W. Bush’s landing on the U.S.S. Lincoln aircraft carrier last week claimed headlines when, in reality, more pressing matters beg front-page attention. He questioned whether the media has become “bored” with reporting on AIDS and he lamented the increasing corporate control of news organizations. It is now up to the public, he said, to determine what issues are important.

Sanders cited a series of sobering statistics on the HIV/AIDS pandemic. 8,500 people each day die due to AIDS and five million people were infected with HIV last year.

“No part of the world knows the devastation of HIV/AIDS more than sub-Saharan Africa” he asserted, noting that there, 8.8 percent of the adult population is infected. Sanders also affirmed that the disease is spreading rapidly in a number of other regions, including India, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, China and Russia.

Turning to his second point – the role of the government in responding to the pandemic – Sanders said that while the HIV/AIDS crisis has leveled off in the United States over the past decade, Washington’s response to the crisis, particularly in its nascent stage in the 1980s, has been shocking.

Before the audience gathered in Dana, Sanders proclaimed: “The failure of U.S. leadership, as well as political leadership around the world, at the outset of this crisis was blatant and unforgivable. Ignorance, denial and a stark homophobia squandered our chance to face up to the threat.” Silence, he continued, is no way to deal with any threat to civil society, be it the AIDS crisis in the 1980s in the United States, or the recent outbreak of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in China.

There is reason for hope despite Washington’s record and the rampant surge of the disease around the globe. Sanders said that medical treatments have caused AIDS deaths in the United States to drop from approximately 40,000 each year to a figure closer to 15,000. He also stated that last week saw new AIDS legislation passed in Congress with Bush’s backing. The legislation will contribute $15 billion to combat the disease worldwide. “Don’t cheer yet,” he warned, because authorization in Congress does not always amount to financial appropriation. He said that the president’s upcoming fiscal year budget calls for only a $1.7 billion commitment to HIV/AIDS.

Finally, Sanders criticized drug companies for trying to turn a profit rather than acting with morality to make HIV/AIDS therapy available to all. The cost of medical treatment is prohibitive for most HIV/AIDS sufferers, he confirmed.

Sanders approached the topic of pharmacuetical companies’ role in the fight against HIV/AIDS with deep skepticism, noting the pharmecuetical industry is this nation’s most prosperous. He used an example of a drug treatment offered by Glaxo-Smith. Glaxo recently dropped the price of this HIV/AIDS medicine to make it more readily available, though Sanders cautioned that this gesture of seeming goodwill was motivated in part by the distribution of the same therapy by international drug companies at much lower rates than Glaxo’s.

A fundamental moral issue arises Sanders explained. He said, “The right we must uphold is the right of every human being to access to the medicines which can save his or her life.” Sanders also recommended that for success in the fight against HIV/AIDS, developing nations need to be relieved of massive debts they owe to institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) so that those governments might use funds for pressing domestic concerns like HIV/AIDS, hunger and education.

He concluded by urging the audience to demand that Washington establish “a better set of national priorities,” and to make HIV/AIDS prevention one such priority.

Simon Isaacs ‘03.5, organizer of this weekend’s Middlebury Global AIDS Forum, said that Sanders was an appropriate speaker to launch the AIDS forum because of his Capitol Hill background. Isaacs said that the U.S. government has the ability to combat the pandemic. Our government, he said, “has the fiscal and legislative powers to mobilize the necessary resources, to pass the necessary laws and to persuade the necessary actors to turn the tide on this pandemic.” AIDS, he said, is a highly politicized issue and bringing Sanders to Middlebury demonstrated this fact.