By the end of the conference, every spare foot of space had been plastered with $10 billion now stickers, and 'non-negotiable' became a catchphrase.
Wheels and deals
And yet negotiation was precisely what the conference was about. The innumerable
research papers presented were clearly not the main business of the week.
That was happening underneath, in deals being struck between politicians,
drug companies, and health lobbyists.
To take one example: both the Prime and Health Ministers of the tiny state
of St Kitts showed up, initially, it seemed, to unveil their new Aids
Plan alongside other leaders of the Caribbean, the world's second hardest-hit
area. Why so much exposure for an island with 76 Aids cases?
The answer was revealed the following day at an evening 'town hall
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Peter Piot; Aids now a global political issue
meeting' of current and former heads of state. Former
US President Bill Clinton revealed that St Kitts Prime Minister Denzil
Davies, sitting alongside him, had just struck a pioneering regional deal
for cheap drugs between 15 Caribbean nations and 13 major drug companies,
and was also spearheading a unique multi-nation bid to the GFATM. The
conference had indeed become, for the first time ever, a true political
summit on Aids.
The Brazilian Health Minister, Paulo Texeira, announced that Brazil was
offering the technology needed to make generic antiretrovirals for free
to other poor countries. He criticised the rich countries of the world
both for their meanness and their morality. But he also attacked the 60
per cent of developing
Paulo Texeira; Brazil offering cheap drugs
countries who had no component for treatment in their funding applications to the GFATM.
