Former President George W. Bush made a rare appearance in Washington, DC, on Friday, rallying his administration, a significant political opponent in former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and even Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to defend his biggest foreign policy triumph.
The US government claims to have saved 25 million lives, but Bush is concerned that most Americans are unaware of this reality.
This year celebrates the 20th anniversary of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which rock icon Bono termed a “brilliant initiative, rather lousy acronym” in a video message broadcast into the ceremony.
Pelosi sat a row behind Dr. Anthony Fauci, who worked on the federal response to AIDS, and just in front of Ukraine’s ambassador to the US – in addition to funding Ukraine’s effort to repel Russia’s invasion, the US also helps fund Ukraine’s effort to control AIDS. They’re all hopeful that the United States renews its commitment to PEPFAR, which costs a relative pittance in terms of US government tax dollars – $7 billion in 2022 and more than $110 billion altogether over 20 years – yet has saved so many lives.
Two of those 25 million people attended the event.
Tatu Msangi discovered she was HIV positive in 2004, while pregnant with her daughter Faith.
“Seventeen years later, my daughter, Faith, stands alongside me as a representative of the 5.5 million babies born HIV free as a result of years of the PEPFAR program,” Msangi said.
It’s not exactly clear that PEPFAR or its funding are in any danger, and I could not find any top Republicans who are actively lobbying against it.
However, with the new Republican majority in the House discussing spending cuts and the current White House frustrating the former president by attempting to roll the programme into a new bureau whose sole focus would not be AIDS in Africa, Bush went on stage with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete to educate people.
“I’m here to tell folks that American taxpayers’ money is making a significant difference, a measurable difference in saving lives, 25 million people. “Yet most Americans have no idea what we’re talking about,” Bush remarked during the event, which was hosted by his eponymous presidential centre at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington.
A message to America’s current leaders
When Rice asked if he had a message for American leaders “because there are a lot of individuals in our nation who say we should mind our own business,” Bush said emphatically that the US must continue to spend money outside its boundaries.
“I believe we are a large enough country to do more than one thing,” he remarked. “To continue to fight against AIDS in the continent of Africa and to support the Ukrainian freedom fighters does not constrain our capacity to help our own citizens. I don’t understand why there’s any resistance to a program like PEPFAR unless we’ve lost our compassion.”
The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, is a major backer of the program.
“I still remember when I met Botswanan President Masisi in 2019, and he told me the U.S. global health investments in Africa – specifically PEPFAR – has saved a generation of people from extinction in his country,” McCaul said in a statement when asked about Bush’s comments.
I’ve been considering a newsletter focused on PEPFAR since President Joe Biden invited Bono to his State of the Union address and held PEPFAR up as an example of what can be done when lawmakers with different viewpoints work together.
When people came together in the early ’00s
That Bono, lead singer of the rock band U2, worked back in 2003 during the Iraq War with Bush, the Republican president, and Pelosi, then new to her role as Democratic leader, and with conservative and liberal lawmakers, feels bizarre today, when the political leaders are barely speaking.
That said, I think we forget how toxic the political environment was during the Iraq War years.
I talked to Tom Hart, president of the ONE Campaign, for his perspective on how the program worked, how much it’s cost the US and how they found a way, as he put it, to get “the chairman of the pro-life caucus working with the Congressional Black Caucus,” and LGBT activists alongside evangelical pastors. The ONE Campaign was co-founded by Bono and aims “to end extreme poverty and preventable disease by 2030,” according to its website.
Excerpts of that conversation are below.
What is PEPFAR?
WOLF: For starters, how exactly does PEPFAR work?
HART: PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, is the US bilateral program to provide care treatment and prevention for people suffering from HIV. Caring for those impacted and their families and orphans – preventative measures like condoms and education and training and treatment.
That last bit, treatment, was what was revolutionary, frankly, at the time. Twenty years ago, there was not any strategy or a conception that you could provide wide-scale treatment in sub-Saharan Africa or other resource-poor settings.
It was quite radical, frankly, to develop a plan to simplify drug regimens and get them widely distributed, as President Bush described, by motorcycle and bicycle if necessary. How it happened is a longer story, but that is what the crux of the program was, and it has been wildly successful over the years.
It has exceeded its goals many, many times over and been endorsed by every president since and funded by every Congress since then – a really transformative program in terms of the lives that it saved, now 25 million lives over 20 years.
