TORONTO — One has staggering wealth and entrepreneurial savvy, the other boundless charisma and political muscle. Now, the two Bills — Gates and Clinton — are using their combined star power, not to mention the considerable cash in their foundation coffers, to draw attention to the “breathtaking human tragedy” that is HIV/AIDS.
The pair warned that the epidemic, which infected 60 million people worldwide over the past quarter-century, poses an immediate and lasting threat to the global economy and international political stability.
“It's difficult to imagine how the world can grow unless we tackle AIDS,” Mr. Clinton said yesterday at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto. Almost 10,000 delegates packed the conference room.
The former U.S. president, who now heads The William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, predicted it “will be a rocky road until we find a vaccine or cure” but that he remained optimistic the battle against HIV/AIDS will be won.
Bill Gates (left) and former U.S. president Bill Clinton wave to the audience at the end of the symposium on 'Priorities in Ending the Epidemic' at AIDS conference in Toronto. (JORGE UZON/AFP/Getty Images)
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Much of his optimism, he said ruefully, comes from knowing that Mr. Gates has made it a priority for investing his riches in the battle.
“Bill Gates made a fair amount of money by being able to imagine the future and helping to create a big part of it,” Mr. Clinton said.
“Do you really believe that he and his wife would be giving all their money away and that naive Warren Buffett would give all his money to them to give away if they didn't believe not only that people's lives were worth saving, but that they could be saved?”
Mr. Gates, the chairman of Microsoft Corp. and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said the initial idea for his foundation was to tackle population issues as a way of improving the economic prospects of the poor. But he quickly realized that people need to be physically healthy to have economic prospects, and infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS posed a huge barrier to progress.
“In many ways, AIDS is the most cruel disease at all,” Mr. Gates said, pointing to the fact that it tends to strike men and women in their most economically productive years, and leave their children orphaned and condemned to poverty.
Not surprisingly, the technological guru has touted the need for scientific innovation to tackle the pandemic of HIV/AIDS. His $62-billion (U.S.) foundation has invested heavily in the search for a vaccine, and is now showing great interest in microbicides and antiretroviral medications.
In yesterday's panel discussion, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gates showed that their passion in the cause is real, answering questions with aplomb and remarkable detail.
Mr. Clinton said the biggest impediment to ramping up HIV-AIDS treatment and prevention programs is the critical shortage of nurses in the developing world.
“We do need a lot more nurses,” he said. The charismatic ex-politician said that in all the discussion about making drugs available to people suffering from HIV/AIDS, it is often forgotten, that trained health care workers are essential to deliver care.
“You can't just take these ARVs (antiretroviral drugs) and drop them in a parachute,” he said. “You need a health infrastructure.”
Mr. Gates echoed those views saying that without adequate numbers of qualified nurses, doctors and community health workers, the epidemic will never be reigned in.
“The world's ability to treat is not gated by drug prices any more, but by personnel issues,” he said. “Training capacity has got to be increased so that there isn't a treatment bottleneck.” According to the International Council of Nurses, there is a shortage of 60,000 in southern Africa alone, the region hardest hit by HIV/AIDS. Of the 38.6 million people living with the disease, more than one-third live in southern Africa.
Both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gates' foundations have invested a lot of time and money in the battle against AIDS and they were asked why.
“I wanted to stop people from dying who didn't have to die,” Mr. Clinton said, with his folksy charm. “It's a breathtaking human tragedy.” Mr. Gates' response was much more business-like, and he described HIV/AIDS as an economic threat. At the same time, he told of being touched by his visits with AIDS patients in the developing world. He and his wife, Melinda French Gates, spent all of July in Africa, visiting projects funded by the foundation.
Throughout the conference, there has been pointed criticism of U.S. policies, notably a reluctance to fund HIV/AIDS programs that involve condoms, contraception and abortion and its enthusiasm for abstinence-based education.
But both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gates gave a more nuanced view, saying the U.S. government deserves credit for its massive $15-billion in HIV/AIDS funding over five years.
“An abstinence-only program is going to fail,” Mr. Clinton said, but he noted that only 30 per cent of U.S. funding has been earmarked for abstinence-based programs. “On balance, this program has done a lot more good than harm.”
Mr. Gates also praised U.S. initiatives, particularly on the treatment front, saying they have provided antiretroviral drugs to more than 500,000 people in 15 of the world's poorest countries.
