I’ve been critical of the Bush Administration and the GOP lately, for many good reasons I believe, but it is nice to be reminded of some of the successes. Sebastian Mallaby had a good column the other day in the Washington Post wherein he highlighted the promising results of President Bush’s efforts on fighting AIDS. One wonders if the man will get the credit he deserves by liberal gay groups. I somehow doubt it.
Spending on AIDS:
“[S]ince the president’s pledge, spending on global AIDS programs has risen steadily: to $2.3 billion in 2004, $2.7 billion in 2005 and to $3.3 billion this year. The administration’s budget for 2007 requests $4 billion from Congress, more than quadruple the level in 2001. So the Bush team is on target to exceed the $15 billion promise”.
Generic drugs for AIDS:
“Starting in 2004, the administration fixed this problem. It directed the FDA to license generics for use in U.S. global AIDS programs, even when those generics could not be sold in the United States because they infringed U.S. patents…generic after generic was soon licensed, and in some countries around two-thirds of U.S. spending on AIDS drugs now goes to non-branded medicines. Given how often foreign aid is tied to exports from donor countries, it’s remarkable that the Bush team stiffed Big Pharma in favor of cost-effective help for AIDS patients”.
Funding to abstinence-based programs:
“Abstinence and faithfulness teaching consumes only 7 percent of the total, and an unknown fraction of that is constructively combined with teaching about condoms. The critics cite a few wacko preachers who have received U.S. money even though they proclaim that condoms don’t work, and the Government Accountability Office has described how the abstinence earmark complicates the work of front-line AIDS groups. But it’s wrong to paint the entire Bush AIDS program as a Christian-conservative plot when the abstinence-only stuff is relatively limited”.
On this at least I can say Bravo Zulu, Mr. President.
If you buy the premise that all this government activity is effective in solving the problem – then I agree, Bush has done WAY more than Clinton on AIDS. Disproving some ignorant Left beliefs – but of course, they mostly won’t be changing those beliefs or giving Bush credit.
——- with that said ————-
As a Capitalist, I have to point out that all this magnificent-looking government activity usually does harm, not good.
Take the drugs as one example. So, Bush made those evil drug companies sell at generic prices in Africa. Sounds great! (to a statist / socialist) Until, that is, you study (as I have) the economics of the drug industry.
It turns out that drug development is one of the riskiest businesses you can possibly be in. The numbers vary from different sources but, roughly speaking, for every 200 drug development projects you undertake – and they’re all inherently expensive, long and difficult – in the end you get roughly 4 medically useful but unprofitable drugs, plus one blockbuster that gives you a big profit. And that profit is the only thing paying for the other 200 projects – without which, you could not have gotten the 5 (say) useful drugs.
It turns out that wildcatting oil wells is less risky! Bottom line: The more you squeeze the drug company’s profit on that one blockbuster, useful drug – the more you undermine or prevent the discovery of the next good drugs.
Germany is slowly discovering this with its drug companies in the last 20 years. They have put their drug companies under even more regulation and profit-squeeze than the U.S. companies and, sure enough, their pipeline of good new drugs has gone down… in some cases, way down.
I could easily discuss why some of the other government actions and aid programs (whether Bush or Clinton) will have unintended consequences that create or worsen the AIDS problem, but the above example is enough for one post.
Somehow, despite the amazing amount of money Bush has pledged for fighting AIDS, from the left I hear only criticism on this issue. The screed goes something like this: 1) it’s not enough, 2) not all that has been promised has materialized yet, 3) it’s all tied to abstinence-only education, which is killing Africians. Conclusion: Bush doesn’t care about black people; he only cares about scoring political points by imposing his rightwing morality on Africians at the cost of their lives. (!)
Yeah, the layers of baffling stupidity are beyond my patience to address. And while Calarato has a good and valid point on the economic dubiousness of pressuring pioneering drug companies, of course that is one angle the left doesn’t bother to attack Bush on, because leftism almost requires economic illiteracy. As near as I can tell, the people that have spouted off to me simply took an incongruent fact to their worldview: (a “winger” giving billions to fight AIDS and help Africans?) And plugged it into preconceived stereotypes: rightwing moralism, hypocrisy, lies. Inconvinent truth dealt with, no need to disturb one’s mindset any further.
‘Yeah, the layers of baffling stupidity are beyond my patience to address.’
Rather than say that…why not try to address them?
“leftism almost requires economic illiteracy”
Really? Why? It seems that you are doing exactly what you accuse others of doing.
“Yeah, the layers of baffling stupidity are beyond my patience to address.”
‘Rather than say that…why not try to address them?’
Hmmm… maybe because it’s “beyond her patience” as she stated already?
#1 Calarato — June 3, 2006 @ 3:44 pm – June 3, 2006
Germany is slowly discovering this with its drug companies in the last 20 years. They have put their drug companies under even more regulation and profit-squeeze than the U.S. companies and, sure enough, their pipeline of good new drugs has gone down… in some cases, way down.
I’m sure that you can provide a citation for this assertion.
Because of a thrombosis, my partner is on a US prescribed regimen of Coumadin, a trademarked minor variation of warfarin, which has long been available and used as a rat poison. (For the uninitiated, warfarin is a “blood-thinner.”) Coumadin is also available here in Germany, but is not widely prescribed for thromboses (another medicament is prescribed, but I don’t recall the name). A couple of weeks ago, we did a comparison of the price of Coumadin between the US pharmacies and the German Apotheke, and were shocked (shocked! I tell you!) and dismayed to find that the price of Coumadin in the US was twice the price of the same product in Germany.
Given the facts that (a) we are private pay patients, and (b) Coumadin is not widely prescribed in Germany, it is highly unlikely that the rather substantial price difference between the US and Germany would be due to German government regulation.
I know that it is common among Americans to ascribe high prices of pharmaceuticals in the US to the high cost of drug development, but it is not true. Much of the high prices is due to advertising costs. The “effective components” of lifestyle drugs like Viagra, Cialis, Nexium (the purple pill) and other drugs that are heavily advertized in US media were known long ago.
BTW, I’ll merely throw this out as a reminder. Remember the anthrax scare a few years ago? The effective medicament against anthrax was a drug called Cipro. The patent for Cipro as a use against anthrax was owned by a German company. The Bush malAdministration rather substantially threatened the German company that it would break the patent if the company did not offer to provide Cipro on terms that the Bush malAdministration deemed reasonable. That further illustrated to me the hypocrisy of conservatives.
Fact is, Bruce, you’ve never been critical of this president. Not really.
You’re to deeply in love with him.
Dan
#6 – Dan, one could say the same thing about most gays and Bill Clinton, even when he screwed us over with DOMA signed in the middle of the night (presumably after Monica’s blowjob and before Hillary threw an ashtray at him).
In fact, the Advocate’s write-up of Slick Willie was so disgustingly horny and slobbery that I had to throw it in the trash – where it belonged.
Regards,
Peter H.
I see raj has done another fictitious study.
Still waiting for that other one.
Bush has been a much better leader on the AIDS crisis than Clinton, his father, and Reagan. If we had been doing this at the start of the epidmic rather than after the fact, countless lives would have been saved.
Errr… see #1… if Reagan had made clear to the drug companies at the start of the epidemic that they shouldn’t expect to make money on AIDS drugs, as Bush has now done… countless more lives would have been, um, lost…
‘Hmmm… maybe because it’s “beyond her patience” as she stated already?’
But it’s not “beyond her patience” to make unsupported blanket statements.
Patrick writes:
No, and here’s why, in a nutshell:
“For 20 years, ever since men who’d acquired HIV anally were attacked and stigmatized by homophobes, gay men have circled the wagons around anal intercourse, and treated any criticism of anal sex as a betrayal of gay life.” — Bill Weintraub, in a 2003 opinion column printed by The Washington Blade
Gramps offers: “If we had been doing this at the start of the epidmic rather than after the fact, countless lives would have been saved.”
I wish that were true. The real truth is that our community’s culture of narcissim and sexual recklessness hastened the spread of AIDS. That smae impulse is alive and well in the next generation of barebackers, too.
Unfortunately, it took countless legal battles to get the bathouses cleaned up (and closed) in urban areas where wantonly unsafe sexual practices continued long after anal intercourse was identified by the medical community as the primary route of the spread of infection. It took the prosecution of high profile cases to get men to start disclosing HIV status to random sexual partners.
Or how about ASullivan declaring that the AIDS epidemic was over in 1996? Mr HIV+ Barebacker himself may have “killed” more young gay men than it can be construed that RR did (per the GayLeft’s notion: If only RR had spoken the word “AIDS”, we could have saved billions of creative, dynamic men.)
Our community’s culture and attitude toward unlimited, unstructured pursuit of sex and the exercise of sexual freedom is disastrous for us.
I wish it was as easy as Gramps tries to suggest: more money, sooner.
It just isn’t so. Nice notion but it’s empty as a H3 Hummer gas tank these days.
That same culture of narcissism now drives gay leftism, the push for gay marriage, and the “I couldn’t care less about the country, I just vote for somebody based on “gay” issues” mindset.