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www.fairfoundation.org
10/8/06 The Honorable Arlen Specter, Chairman RE: National Institute of Health HIV/AIDS bio-medical research funding Dear Senator Specter, With the recent $37 billion stock pledge by Warren Buffett to the $29 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Mr. Buffett’s support for the Gates’s bias in funding to combat HIV disease, the favoritism afforded this disease has reached excessive proportions. Indeed, Melinda Gates has stated that her fondest goal is a vaccine for HIV disease and to date the total funding by the Gates’s Foundation for all HIV programs is $6.5 billion dollars. It is anticipated that much more of the Gates Foundation will also go to combating HIV disease in the future. When one reflects that the total NIH bio-medical research budget for every disease known to man is only $28.4 billion and ten percent of that also goes to HIV research, one can only be dismayed at the continual favoritism afforded this illness. The solution to HIV is well known as stated by Dr. Fauci and President Clinton: prevention, providing the existing medicines and setting up infrastructures to deliver these remedies. In areas where these solutions have been instituted, deaths have plummeted. For example, in Pennsylvania deaths from HIV/AIDS have fallen to 48 (2004)[i] and in California’s newly infected HIV patients, deaths since 1992 have fallen 97 percent to 265 (through 8/31/06).[ii] The issue of AIDS favoritism is rapidly becoming a political issue. Before billions more dollars are spent on yet another preventive measure (HIV vaccine), we urge you to become the first Senator to publicly call for a partial redistribution of the HIV excess funding to other illnesses that do not presently have effective treatments, including the sixteen maladies [iii] that are killing a million more Americans than HIV disease annually. Indeed, with the budgetary limitations resulting from our government’s commitments, including supporting the war in Iraq and restoring the areas ravaged by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, necessary increases for disease research funding are non-existent. As with the common citizen whose budget is pinched, it is appropriate to reallocate existing funds, in this case some of HIV/AIDS funding to other illnesses. 61 million voters with cardiovascular disease, 21 million diabetics and millions of other constituents with non-AIDS illnesses will applaud your courageous declaration, while approximately one million Americans with HIV/AIDS may be dismayed at such an announcement. I am attaching our recent letter to NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, MD, which thoroughly addresses this issue, for your review and I have listed the cosignatories of these letters on the following pages. They constitute the FAIR Foundation’s 28-member Board of Directors which represents our thousands of members and supporters in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. We thank you very much for your time and consideration of our request. With great respect, I am,
Richard Darling, DDS, National Public Citizen of
the Year (NASW) [i] http://fairfoundation.org/states/hiv-aids_deaths_by_state.htm [ii] http://www.dhs.ca.gov/aids/Statistics/pdf/Stats2006/Aug06AIDSMerged.pdf [iii] http://www.fairfoundation.org/thesixteen.htm
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