The National Catholic Prayer Breakfast tomorrow would be a great time to underscore the importance of PEPFAR.
Like many sub-Saharan African countries, Tanzania’s economy was weakened by the AIDS crisis. President Kikwete was passionate about the fight against disease. He and his wife, Salma, had taken an AIDS test on national television to set a good example for the Tanzanian people. Even more impressive, the Kikwetes adopted an orphan whose parents had died of AIDS.
President Kikwete took us to an HIV/AIDS clinic at the Amana District Hospital, which had opened in 2004 with support from PEPFAR. As the director of the hospital showed us around, Laura and I saw a girl sitting on a bench in the courtyard with her grandmother. She was nine years old and HIV-positive. She had received the virus from her mother, who had died. AIDS had taken her father, too. Yet the little girl was smiling. Her grandmother explained that Catholic Relief Services had been paying for the girl to receive treatment at the PEPFAR clinic. “As a Muslim,” the elderly woman said, “I never imagined that a Catholic group would help me like that. I am so grateful to the American people.”
At a news conference, I reiterated my call for Congress to reauthorize and expand PEPFAR. President Kikwete jumped in: “If this program is discontinued or disrupted, there would be so many people who will lose hope; certainly there will be death. My passionate appeal is for PEPFAR to continue.” An American reporter asked him if Tanzanians were excited about the prospect of Barack Obama becoming president. Kikwete’s reply warmed my heart. “For us,” he said, “the most important thing is, let him be as good a friend of Africa as President Bush has been.”
As we were flying back to Washington, Laura and I agreed the trip had been the best of the presidency. There was a new and palpable sense of energy and hope across Africa. The outpouring of love for America was overwhelming. Every time I hear an American politician or commentator talk about our country’s poor image in the world, I think about the tens of thousands of Africans who lined the roadsides to wave at our motorcade and express their gratitude to the United States.
Former President George W. Bush wrote that in his post-White House book, Decision Points. He gives a mini-tour of some of the civil society we buttressed through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS he established.
Vice President JD Vance is speaking Friday (tomorrow) at the annual National Prayer Breakfast at the convention center in Washington, D.C. It would be a wonderful opportunity to make clear that the healthy survival of the PEPFAR program is a priority for the Trump administration.
With all the challenges and temptations that come with being a Catholic in the political square — and not president, but vice president — there’s plenty of reason to believe that Vance, a Catholic convert, wants to take the Gospel and Catholic social teaching seriously in his public and private life. Good stewardship is in keeping with that. So, of course, is charity, and looking out for neighbors in need.
PEPFAR has been a lifesaving game changer for Africa,. The New York Times recently published an opinion piece by two doctors, a holy Romannumbers cruncher and one K-Lo, asking the administration to not let PEPFAR get lost in the necessary housecleaning at USAID/State Department. While waivers were supposedly issued, they seem not to have operational teeth under current circumstances.
The Times had a few titles on the piece, but this was the most accurate: “Pro-Life Politicians Must Save PEPFAR.” We wrote, in part:
We think PEPFAR should be a special priority of the pro-life movement. Its treatments empower mothers to protect their unborn children and provide hope that the births of these children will be moments of joy, not despair. It’s the same kind of hope we’ve tried to give mothers when we’ve stood outside abortion clinics to offer alternatives, or counseled women through high-risk pregnancies.
Every day, PEPFAR helps about 430 pregnant women get an H.I.V. diagnosis early enough to reduce their viral load and prevent transmission to their babies. If PEPFAR’s work remains interrupted for the full 90-day foreign aid pause, an estimated 136,000 babies will be infected with H.I.V. at birth who otherwise would not be.
Supporting PEPFAR means putting babies’ lives above partisan politics. The program has drawn scrutiny to make sure it complies with the law and never promotes or performs abortion. In his first term, President Trump brought PEPFAR under the Mexico City Policy, which extends that prohibition to any work that partners do, even on their own time and with their own funding.
Matt Bai wrote in the Washington Post earlier this week:
Rubio had decreed that certain critical programs — such as aid to Ukraine and Syria and costs related to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa — would continue to be funded. Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House.
But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments — a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online. Meanwhile, AIDS clinics shuttered and staff found themselves stranded in unstable countries such as Congo. A pregnant woman in an undisclosed country has sued the Trump administration because she was denied a medevac helicopter. In another case, I was told, an employee in southern Africa who needed chemotherapy was also denied a chopper because no one would authorize the money.
The National Catholic Prayer Breakfast tomorrow would be a great time to underscore the importance of PEPFAR. Especially considering Republican Representative Chris Smith will be honored there for his work as a Catholic in the public square. A human-rights stalwart, he has been committed to keeping the program honest and ridding it of sexual-revolutionary ideological creep — a.k.a. Planned Parenthood’s wish lists. Vance could easily use his remarks to show the White House values laborers in the pro-life vineyards like Smith and commit to keep PEPFAR working in the spirit in which it was founded: to support human dignity — both of human life and fidelity, meaning marriage and family.