https://archive.md/yapBo
"This is a tough column for a liberal to write. You may recall that I spent
eight years hammering President George W. Bush for just about everything he did
(and he deserved it!), yet one more thing must be said: Bush started the single
best policy of any president in my lifetime.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Bush’s mammoth program to fight H.I.V.
and AIDS. That turned the tide of the epidemic and has saved 25 million lives
so far.
Think of that: 25 million lives. That’s like saving every Australian. That’s
more than all the Jews killed in the Holocaust and all the people killed in the
genocides of Armenians, Cambodians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Darfuris and Rohingya;
all the confirmed deaths from Covid worldwide; all the deaths of American
troops in all wars in the country’s history back to 1776; all the gun deaths in
the United States in the last half-century; and all the auto deaths in the
United States in the last half-century — combined.
Bush’s initiative was called the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or
PEPFAR. It paid for antiretroviral medicines for people with AIDS and for
efforts to prevent the spread of the virus, including to newborns through
childbirth. I knew how transformative PEPFAR had been when I interviewed coffin
makers in Malawi and Lesotho and they fretted about the collapse of their
business model: Because of Bush, many fewer people were dying.
“Genius plan; pretty crap acronym,” Bono called it. He also described it as
“the most eloquent expression of American values anyone can think of in recent
times.”
Sigh. It’s awkward for liberals when an earnest Irishman thanks us for a
program created by Bush! How is it that the leading humanitarian initiative of
our lifetime was engineered not by a globalist progressive but rather by a guy
with whom we disagree on almost everything?"
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-women-uzbekistan-conservation-colombia-river-florida/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
