PEPFAR has saved 25 million lives, but now it's in danger.
The best thing Republicans have done in my lifetime was creating, 20 years ago, an enormous program to fight AIDS. It turned the tide of AIDS worldwide, saving 25 million lives so far. That's the equivalent of the population of Australia. |
The program is called PEPFAR, or the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and its congressional authorization expires at the end of this month. Astonishingly, many Republicans are now fighting the reauthorization of this heroic program their party gave birth to. |
My latest column asks: Why would some Republicans attempt to repudiate their greatest modern achievement? They are listening to rumors that PEPFAR is somehow paying for abortions. This is false and would be contrary to U.S. policy, but this misinformation has put PEPFAR in jeopardy. |
Some also fret that AIDS is a "lifestyle disease" and so should be targeted by education and moral argument. I flinch at that. During the worst of the epidemic in the 2000s, I met women in southern Africa whose husbands worked in distant mines; those women were terrified, knowing that they risked death if their husbands had strayed. PEPFAR eased that fear, and I hate to think what would happen to those women if the moralizers once more tried to fight AIDS with finger-wagging rather than antiretrovirals. |
In a larger sense, PEPFAR's reauthorization seems to be a fundamental test of the ability to govern by a once-great party that in recent years seems, to me at least, to have descended into periodic madness. |
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