Bush and AIDS

Sebastian Mallaby is absolutely right to welcome the Bush administration’s remarkable effort to deal with AIDS and HIV in the developing world. They will never get any credit from most AIDS groups, for purely political reasons. But the more than $15 billion that has been spent providing cheap and effective, often generic medicine, to people with AIDS is a real achievement. It is something Bill Clinton never did – and he could have prevented so many more deaths had he acted sooner. The missing link is still the stigma the Bush (and Clinton) administrations attach to people with HIV and AIDS by denying them any right to enter the U.S., even as tourists. It is very difficult to fight the stigma that propels many HIV infections, especially in Africa, when the U.S. government brandishes that stigma in its own immigration policies.