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Ford Foundation President Addresses AIDS in America Forum

Let me begin by taking a moment to thank the Kaiser Family Foundation for their partnership with Ford in organizing today’s event, and the Washington Post for hosting us. Let me add that I am grateful to all of you for joining us this morning. It is your participation, your passion and your engagement that are critically important if we are to leave here with a new commitment to fighting today’s AIDS crisis in America.

As we begin our conversation, it’s important to remember two key facts about AIDS in America. The first is that over the past three decades, we have made extraordinary advances in the fight against HIV-AIDS. We have saved millions of lives; both those afflicted and those, who because of our efforts, never contracted the virus.

I am of the generation that came of age in New York at the beginning of the epidemic. If you are fifty today, then you were sixteen in 1979, when the disease was beginning to take hold; eighteen in 1981, when it was raging silently through the gay community. Twenty in 1983, when we began to understand that something desperately serious was happening. Something we couldn’t understand; something deeply frightening.

Many of us watched people die helplessly and seemingly without end. Silence equaled death, but to many of us, so young at the time, it seemed intimacy also equaled death.

Today, millions of individuals who are HIV-positive are living healthy and fulfilling lives. Tens of millions of others can have intimate moments, knowing that they are not risking their futures. It’s a statement that 20 years ago no one could have hoped utter. It’s a testament to what many of you in this room have accomplished.

This achievement represents one of the great public health successes in our history, and it is due in no small measure to the tireless dedication and commitment of AIDS activists—many of whom are in this room.

But that’s only one reality. Today, right now, right here, there remains an AIDS crisis in America—one that is different from the one we faced in 1980s and early 1990s, and one that has become almost invisible in our public debate and public policy. And this is the second story.

Today there are nearly 1.2 million people in the United States living with HIV/AIDS. Half of these people are not receiving regular care, and almost one in five doesn’t even know he or she has the virus. Eight of the ten states with the highest rates of new HIV diagnoses are in the South—where resources for treatment are among the lowest in the nation. Who would have thought twenty years ago that we would have the ability to stop the disease dead in its tracks, but would choose not to?

Of course, all of this is happening while the nature of the epidemic has changed. While once AIDS ravaged a predominantly young white male population, today, it is taking its heaviest toll on the African-American community. Just this morning I was told that the rate of infection among gay black men of my age approaches sixty percent. Black women account for two-thirds of new AIDS cases among women. If you looked solely at the HIV infection rate among African-Americans, it would rank among the highest infection rates in the world, including sub-Saharan Africa. It’s not Botswana, it’s Washington, DC.

Yet even as the epidemic rages among some of this country’s most vulnerable communities, the crisis has fallen off the front pages. The anger has receded. Voices have grown quiet. A silence born of stigma, fear, poverty and discrimination has muted the outrage of the 1980’s. And the results show it.

The epidemic continues to rage, only its face has changed. With all the progress we’ve made, that so many remain at risk, that so many fall to the disease, is simply unacceptable. It speaks to the work that still needs to be done—and the importance of this global meeting.

That meeting and this forum today represent a crucial opportunity to move the new face of this crisis out of the shadows and onto the national agenda where it belongs. It is an opportunity to remind those who care about this crisis, this epidemic, that they don’t need to go all the way to Africa to see the fire. That it rages right here in America, right here in Washington, DC.

At Ford, we hear the voices of those in this country who are being left aside in this new generation of the epidemic. I hope you hear them, you amplify them and call for them to be heard by others.

We can choose to end this epidemic. We can choose to do what was unimaginable thirty years ago. But to do so we need to leave here with a new resolve to act. To not accept the status quo because that status quo, that silence, equals death. I have great hope that with your leadership and your engagement we can and will do just that.

Watch the live webcast and visit AIDS2012.org for more information.

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Joshua Cinelli

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