Clinton and Gates warn that donors won’t continue to give more in hard times unless money is well spent
BILL CLINTON and Bill Gates yesterday urged Aids activists to squeeze value out of every cent of funds to fight HIV, saying they could not expect donors to give more in hard times unless it was carefully spent.
Addressing 20,000 Aids scientists, health workers and activists at an international conference in Vienna, the former US president and the Microsoft founder said efficiency savings were vital in delivering HIV/Aids prevention services and treatment to the countries hardest hit and at highest risk.
“The world is awash in troubles. It is easy to rail at a government and say, ‘Give us more money’. But we also have to change the way we do what we do,” said Mr Clinton. “If we’re going to make this case, they have to believe that we are doing our job faster, better and cheaper. Then we have the moral standing to go ask people to give us more money.”
Mr Gates, whose Gates Foundation spends a large portion of its $34 billion (€26 million) fund on fighting Aids, said efficiency was vital to be able to scale up access to drugs for the 15 million people who need them.
“We can’t keep spending Aids resources in exactly the same way we do today,” he said. “As we . . . advocate for more funding, we also need to make sure we’re getting the most benefit from each dollar of Aids funding and every ounce of effort.”
The head of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria says it needs $20 billion (€15.4 billion) in the next three years to sustain progress in tackling the diseases.
Out of the 33.4 million people who are infected with the HIV that causes Aids, 5.2 million now get the drugs they need. But non-drug-related costs of treatment, such as hospital fees, labs, testing and monitoring, are more than twice that of the medicines.
Mr Gates called for rapid scale-up of “cheap, effective and easy to apply” HIV/Aids prevention measures – such as male circumcision and prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV – which he said were so cost-effective “that in endemic countries it is more expensive not to pursue them”.
Both Mr Gates and Mr Clinton also cited new studies showing that treating HIV patients with cocktails of Aids drugs can dramatically reduce transmission of the virus to others.
Mr Clinton, whose William Clinton Foundation also works in the fight against Aids, warned activists not to battle with president Barack Obama’s administration or other governments who, he said, were on their side.
Hundreds of protesters marched through the Vienna conference on Sunday to demonstrate against a fall in funding for Aids in the wake of a global recession.
Mr Clinton said the campaigners should seek to work with Mr Obama, not against him. “You have two options here, you can demonstrate and call the president names, or we can go get some more votes Congress to get some more money,” he said.
“My experience is that the second choice is a better one and far likelier to pay off. There is no way the White House will veto an increase in funding for Aids.” – Reuters