Still the Clinton News Network

Media Monitor ^ | 1/8/2007 | Cliff Kincaid

[Mike Bates]

Bill Clinton was back on CNN on World AIDS Day being portrayed as an expert on how to stop AIDS. It shows how the media will not let any of Clinton's sex scandals interfere with his public rehabilitation. The Clinton answer, which is quite unique, is to use an international airline tax to buy more anti-AIDS drugs of dubious value.

The U.N.-backed Unitaid agency is using the proceeds from a global airline tax to pay the Clinton Foundation to buy and distribute the drugs. They don't tell you that the drugs are toxic and can kill, or that they may cause the AIDS virus to mutate, making the disease even more deadly. In other words, it's not an issue that the Clinton plan could make the problem worse.

One of the key players in this scheme is Ira Magaziner, who was Hillary Clinton's point man when she tried to foist socialized medicine on the American people in the first Clinton term. Magaziner is running the Clinton Foundation's anti-AIDS program and helping Unitaid manage the spending of global tax revenue. So far, the international airline tax has not been implemented by the U.S. But the new Democratic Congress may see this as something viable.

If all of this is new to you, consider yourself a victim of a media that refuses to tell the truth about political exploitation of a disease that, so far, has taken over $200 billion in federal revenue from U.S. taxpayers. Meanwhile, diseases that affect far more people, like Alzheimers and heart disease, get far fewer federal dollars for research, development and treatment purposes.

If you have AIDS, you are taken care of through the Ryan White Act, a massive federal program named after an innocent victim of AIDS. . ..

[Pharmboy]

There are more than a dozen agents in 4 major classes that are used to treat HIV...all have side effects like other drugs, some worse then others. This guy is just misinformed.

[Mike Bates]

Does that mean none of the drugs could fairly be termed "of dubious value?"

Thanks, Pharmboy.

[Pharmboy]

Well, it depends where you are in the world and what the patterns of resistance are. The earliest drugs were produced in the late 1980s and have been superceded in this country and in the rest of the industrialized world by better agents ("better" means one of three things in the HIV market: fewer pills/day, less side effects/toxicity and better activity against resistant strains; sometimes the newer agents combine all three attributes).

Drugs that still work well in Africa may be essentially worthless in San Francisco or London. Also, any drug of "dubious" value is quickly replaced by a better one. So again, I do not know what he is referring to. The treatment of HIV/AIDS with antiviral agents is a complex story, but great advances in its treatment have been made by the pharma industry, an imperfect industry to be sure, and one in which I play a small role.

[Mike Bates]

Millee, Happy New Year! You're not snowed in, are you?

Bill may not know how to stop STDs, but he may collect them. You know, sorta like stamps.