Badpuppy Gay Today

Monday, 19 May 1997

President Clinton told a May 17 audience at Morgan State University in Baltimore that he looks forward to ridding the world of AIDS within the next decade. Explaining that the "age of biology" is upon us, he hoped, he said, that an AIDS vaccine : "would appear as its first great triumph." The President compared his 10-year AIDS initiative to the famed challenge issued by former President John F. Kennedy launching the 1960's race to the moon.

"We dare not be complacent," he said, unveiling a plan that included 50 salaried AIDS vaccine researchers to be stationed at the National Institutes of Health.

Clinton reflected on the fact that millions of people worldwide are infected with the virus and that it now ranks with malaria and tuberculosis as among the world's deadliest diseases. "It is no longer a question of whether we can develop an AIDS vaccine," he said, "it is simply a question of when." But government spending on AIDS, reply the president's critics, isn't keeping pace with the disease.

Washington, D.C. activists, representing ACT UP, denounced Clinton's "I feel your pain" announcement as an empty public relations ploy with no funding attached. Clinton, who promised in 1992 campaigning he'd initiate an all-out research effort like the around-the-clock Manhattan Project, is now said to be "offering only lip service" on his promises to tackle AIDS seriously.

ACT UP members are particularly incensed by the President's decision to forego CURE research, planning instead for a vaccine. "This president has written off the lives of those of us already infected. He is abandoning efforts to find an AIDS cure," states ACT UP's Steve Michael, an HIV-positive Washington, D.C. resident.

More than two million Americans are currently infected with HIV, while AIDS has become the nation's number one killer among people between the ages of 25-44.

Ann Northrop, a New York ACT UP member and former vice-presidential candidate for the AIDS Cure Party, described Clinton's initiative as "utter nonsense" and "a smokescreen." She explains that "scientists have told us for years that a preventive vaccine is virtually impossible." Ms. Northrop says that if Clinton is serious about helping people with AIDS and preventing new infections, he should launch an Apollo Project for a Cure and he should release federal funds for needle exchange." Northrop charges that "Bill Clinton has shuffled a couple dozen employees in his phony war on AIDS."

AIDS activists have long demanded a coordinated AIDS research effort to develop a cure. Still, there is no coordination among researchers within agencies at the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense, University research centers, and the private sectors.

Clinton says he intends to make appeals to other nations to join in the search for a vaccine. He will do this, he promises, when he meets with leaders of the Group of Seven meeting next month in Denver.