Gore Vows to Intensify Global AIDS Battle

Vice President Al Gore, addressing the first U.N. Security Council meeting on a global health issue, announced Monday that the White House will seek to double federal spending to fight AIDS, bringing the U.S. commitment to $325 million in the next fiscal year.

“When a single disease threatens everything from economic strength to peacekeeping, we clearly face a security threat of the greatest magnitude,” Gore said.

Pointing to a landmark shift in the U.S. government’s view of stability in the post-Cold War world, he continued: “We must understand that the old conception of global security, with its focus almost solely on armies, ideologies and geopolitics, has to be enlarged.”

Environmental pollution, the spread of illegal drugs and corruption, terrorism and “the new pandemics” that cross borders and lay waste to entire societies pose threats that are “as grave as war itself,” he said.

While Gore recognized that any speech, even one billed as an official address to the Security Council, would take political overtones when delivered in the heat of a primary election campaign, he instructed his speech writers to avoid the language he uses daily on the campaign trail.

Yet politics were right at the surface.

Thanking Gore for his speech as the United States opened its turn as president of the council, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, “Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Or perhaps I should say Mr. President . . .”

Laughter and applause rippled through the chamber, as Annan paused for effect, then continued: “. . . of the Security Council.”

A grin slowly crossed Gore’s face as he said, “I am working on it.”

Ribbing aside, the speech gave Gore an opportunity--unavailable to Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination--to act on the world stage, offering a grand-sounding vision of the U.S. role in a changing world.

And it gave Richard Holbrooke, the United States’ ambitious new ambassador to the United Nations, an opportunity to demonstrate clout by bringing the vice president to New York for the meeting. Holbrooke already has been mentioned as a potential secretary of State in any future Gore administration.

Political implications?

“Outrageous,” Holbrooke told a reporter who suggested a political tenor to the visit. “None of what he is doing here today has any impact on the present phase of the primary campaign.”

Gore’s speech took on particular significance because the Security Council, more accustomed to summoning its ambassadors to head off distant wars, had never, in its five decades and 4,000-odd meetings, considered public health a threat to global security.

“We tend to think of a threat to security in terms of war and peace. Yet no one can doubt that the havoc wreaked and the toll exacted by HIV/AIDS do threaten our security,” Gore said.

“The heart of our security agenda is protecting lives--and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century,” he said.

The crisis--which the United Nations calls the worst health catastrophe since the bubonic plague devastated Europe in the Middle Ages--is particularly severe in Africa: According to the World Bank, 10 Africans are infected with HIV, the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome, every minute; in Zambia and Zimbabwe, a child born today has a greater chance of dying of AIDS than of living free of the disease. The White House predicts that, in the next decade, more than 40 million children in Africa will be orphaned by AIDS.

Striking across economic and educational lines, AIDS threatens to wipe out many of the gains that the struggling societies of sub-Saharan Africa have made in recent decades. In Asia, HIV infection rates soon will surpass those in Africa, some experts predict.

Gore said the fiscal 2001 budget that President Clinton will send to Congress next month will include $100 million to prevent and treat HIV and AIDS in Africa and Asia, and $50 million to purchase vaccines against the diseases--among them hepatitis B, certain forms of meningitis and yellow fever--that take hold when immune systems are weakened by AIDS.

Yet the need is much greater: With an estimated 22 million infected by HIV in Africa alone, the funds, if approved by Congress, would provide barely 10% of the cost charged by a major pharmaceutical company for such vaccines.

“We can spend $1 billion on war in a day, but we won’t spend $1 billion a year to keep people alive,” said Eric Sawyer, co-founder of the New York chapter of ACT UP, an AIDS activist group. He said that from $1 billion to $3 billion is needed annually just in sub-Saharan Africa to prevent the spread of AIDS and treat those who are infected.

The issue of AIDS has entered the presidential campaign only briefly. At the start of Gore’s political travels last year, protesters occasionally disrupted his speeches with demands that the Clinton administration resolve a trade and patent dispute that they argued blocked the developing world’s access to cut-rate anti-AIDS medicines.

Among the elements of the administration’s plan are distributing the anti-AIDS drug AZT; providing treatment to reduce mother-to-child transmissions; caring for children whose parents have died of AIDS-related complications; and helping to track the spread of infections across populations. It also would provide $10 million to fight workplace discrimination against those with HIV, and $10 million for a Pentagon program intended to prevent the spread of AIDS in African armies.