Copyright 1999 The Baltimore Sun Company
THE
BALTIMORE SUN
June 22, 1999, Tuesday ,FINAL
SECTION: TELEGRAPH ,1A
LENGTH: 1111 words
HEADLINE:
AIDS protesters track Gore on campaign trail; Activists want
change in S. Africa policy
BYLINE:
Jonathan Weisman
SOURCE: SUN NATIONAL STAFF
BODY:
WASHINGTON -- It is an unlikely first issue
of the 2000 presidential campaign: the AIDS epidemic in South
Africa, and whether Vice President Al Gore has helped block the
production and importation of cheap, generic AIDS drugs to
southern Africa.
But three jarring protests at Gore
appearances last week have pushed the issue to the front of the vice president's
consciousness, infuriating Gore's White House staff and raising the stakes when
AIDS activists meet today with the White House
AIDS czar.
The activists have pledged to disrupt Gore's
campaign events until they win a shift in administration trade policy, which
they say favors the powerful pharmaceutical industry over the life-and-death
needs of Africa's poor. Protesters say Gore has led a White
House drive to force South Africa to scuttle an effort that
would bypass U.S. patent laws to provide life-saving medicine to many Africans
dying of AIDS.
"Gore has been carrying out the dirty
work of the pharmaceuticals companies," said Eric Sawyer, co-founder of the
AIDS group ACT UP New York. "He's putting a higher priority on
trade than public health."
But Gore aides -- and even some
AIDS activists -- say the protesters have distorted the vice
president's efforts to forge a compromise between protecting U.S. patent law and
addressing an AIDS crisis in southern Africa.
Susan Rice, the assistant secretary of state for Africa,
asserted that Gore has "led the way" in opposing trade sanctions and other
drastic actions pushed by the pharmaceutical industry.
"The root of what
is wrong in AIDS care is drug pricing, but the vice president
is not the culprit -- the drug companies are," said Daniel Zingale, executive
director of the AIDS Action Council, the nation's largest lobby
on AIDS issues. "Of all the people running for president, Gore
seems like an unlikely one to target."
To many AIDS
activists, the issue is simple: South Africa wants to lower the
price of AIDS treatments, and Gore is trying to block those
efforts. Three times last week, protesters disrupted his rallies with taunts and
signs proclaiming, " Gore's Greed Kills." A rally is planned Monday in
Philadelphia outside a hotel where Gore will be raising campaign cash.
"We're not going to go away until this administration changes its
policy," Sawyer said.
Drug companies cry foul
In 1997, South
Africa passed a law granting its health minister authority to
let local pharmaceutical companies produce generic versions of
AIDS drugs, despite U.S. patents on those drugs. With 3.2
million South Africans infected with HIV, and the price of AIDS
drugs out of reach for most of them, the government called its actions necessary
and legal.
But U.S. and European drug companies cried foul. They rushed
to Congress and the U.S. trade representative for help, and to court in South
Africa to try to block the law. Industry executives won an
injunction.
With the cost of drug development soaring to up to
$500 million for one new medication, patent rights have become
critical to companies' survival, industry officials say.
"Patent
protection is vitally important to this industry," said Jeff Trewhitt, a
spokesman for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or Pharma,
the industry's lobbying arm.
At the industry's behest, Rep. Rodney
Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey Republican, slipped language into last year's budget
law requiring the State Department to report to Congress on its efforts to
suspend or repeal the South African law. In the meantime, no U.S. foreign
aid could be released to South Africa's
government.
The State Department came back with a report in February
that is now haunting Gore. The report said the nation was "making use of the
full panoply of leverage in our arsenal," including the vice president, to gut
the South African law. Gore had made the issue "a central focus" of his meeting
with then-South African Deputy President Thabo Mbeki in August, the report
stated. Gore met with Mbeki in February and again brought up the issue. To the
AIDS activists, this document was the smoking gun.
"Since Gore is the orchestrator of this whole policy, we plan to
continue," said Asia Russell, a member of ACT UP Philadelphia. "We're going to
escalate until these policies change."
Wrong about role, aides say
But Gore aides say the activists are wrong about his role. Leon S.
Fuerth, the vice president's national security adviser, who attended both
meetings with the future South African president,said Gore offered to discuss an
import agreement to let South Africa shop for the best price
for AIDS drugs worldwide and then import them in bulk. The
offer "would likely be controversial with the drug companies," Fuerth said, but
Gore favored "a mutually acceptable solution."
And Gore aides said
AIDS activists are bending other facts. In an open letter to
Gore, for instance, activists asserted that he had authorized the U.S. trade
representative to conduct "a sweeping new review of South
Africa policies" on April 30.
In fact, the April 30
report was the U.S. trade representative's annual report on intellectual
property rights that looked at more than 70 countries. Gore had nothing
to do with it. South Africa was one of 37 countries placed on
the trade representative's "watch list," the lowest-priority category.
Trewhitt acknowledged that the pharmaceutical industry pushed the
administration to label South Africa a "priority foreign
country," which would set a deadline for it to change its disputed policy before
trade sanctions would take effect. But under pressure from Gore's office, the
trade representative refused to do so.
"The vice president took the
position that the health crisis in South Africa really needed
to be taken into account," Rice said.
But AIDS
activists remain unconvinced.
Gore's deputies "want it both ways," said
James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology and a leading Gore
critic on the issue. "They want to sit around with Pharma, negotiate for
campaign contributions, then blame everything on Rodney Frelinghuysen ."
The activists concede that their actions may be shortsighted. Gore has
been generally friendly to AIDS groups, pushing for more
spending on AIDS research and patient care. Sawyer noted that
ACT UP's 1994 campaign against incumbent New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo might have
turned off gay and minority voters, helping elect George E. Pataki, a Republican
who, Sawyer says, has been far less attentive.
"But this is a crisis of
huge proportions," Sawyer said. " This is a genocide of 30 million to 40 million
people of color. It cannot be seen as anything else."
GRAPHIC: PHOTO(S) Homecoming: Vice President Al
Gore and his wife, Tipper, listen to speakers at the annual Family Re-Union
conference in Nashville, Tenn., where he repeated the values theme he used to
launch his campaign.
LOAD-DATE: June 23, 1999
