Why evangelicals turned their back on PEPFAR
In 2006, Ambassador Mark Dybul, then the United States global AIDS coordinator, visited an orphanage run by the Daughters of Charity in Ethiopia. It was a sanctuary for more than 400 HIV-positive babies and young children found in garbage heaps, abandoned on the roadside, or left at the orphanage door. As Dybul and Michael Gerson, then a senior policy adviser to President George W. Bush, walked through the massive campus, they came to the dining hall, where they saw a mural of Jesus surrounded by a group of children. The sisters told them that the mural featured portraits of children who had died of HIV at the orphanage, and that the children came there to talk to and play with their friends on the wall.
The epidemic was hardly confined to Ethiopia. It was ravaging sub-Saharan Africa. Two-thirds of the 40 million people in the world infected with HIV lived in that region. More than 12 million children had been orphaned by AIDS.
“We really are in a national crisis,” the president of Botswana, Festus Mogae, said in 2000. “We are threatened with extinction. People are dying in chillingly high numbers. We are losing the best of young people. It is a crisis of the first magnitude.”
In parts of Botswana, 75 percent of pregnant women had HIV. Most diseases kill the very old and the very young, “but this disease was killing the most productive and reproductive parts of society,” Dybul recalled in 2018. “So not only were many households run by orphans, but entire villages were run by orphans, because everyone else was dead.”
Then came PEPFAR.
The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, first authorized by Bush in 2003, was the largest commitment made by any nation to address a single disease. It was, the president said, “a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa.” PEPFAR, which received strong bipartisan support, is credited with saving 26 million lives and enabling almost 8 million babies to be born without HIV. It transformed the landscape of the HIV epidemic and helped stabilize the African continent. Not only is PEPFAR the single most successful policy to date in U.S.-Africa relations; it is “also one of the most successful foreign policy programs in U.S. history,” as Belinda Archibong, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote last year. [Continue reading…]