Working to Fight AIDS

Benjamin M. Wikler `03 has big plans.

The head of the Harvard AIDS Coalition, a student group he helped found earlier this year to lobby the U.S. government to fight the global AIDS epidemic, he is sticking around Cambridge this summer to plan the expansion of his group across the state and across the nation.

In a noon meeting in the bustling Science Center Greenhouse Café on May 24, Wikler met with other undergraduates and students from Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Kennedy School of Government to organize this summer's activities--including a rally in New York City on June 23--and plan how students can make a difference in the fight against AIDS across the globe.

"Everything is picking up for next year to do a larger-scale mobilization," he says.

Both Wikler and other students involved in activism on the issue of AIDS in poor countries say the last school year has seen a marked increase in media attention to the issue and in action at the international level.

Wikler's group, founded by Wikler, John E. Raskin `03 and Andy D. Litinsky `04, has an e-mail list of about 200 people and represents just one of the ways in which students and faculty across the University have stepped up the campaign against AIDS in some of the world's poorest nations.

And although the University has been involved with scientific research on AIDS since the mid-1980s, this year has seen students take a new approach to fighting the disease where it strikes hardest.

Sachs' Crusade

The University has inserted itself in the fight against AIDS with its "Consensus Statement on Antiretroviral Treatment for AIDS in Poor Countries," which was signed by more than 100 Harvard faculty members. Stone Professor of International Trade Jeffrey D. Sachs '76 spearheaded the signature campaign.

The 26-page statement, released April 4, says, "We believe that on moral, health, social and economic grounds the international community should provide the scientific and financial leadership for a rapid scaling-up of AIDS treatment in the poorest and hardest-hit countries of the world."

It goes on to specifically mention Africa as a part of the world where AIDS treatment is most critically needed.

The statement cites a United Nations (U.N.) estimate that 24.5 million people in sub-Saharan African were infected with HIV at the end of 1999. The HIV virus is deadly if left untreated and the statement argues that the social fabric and economic situation of highly affected nations will further deteriorate if the virus is left untreated. The biggest challenge, the document states, is obtaining and distributing drugs to treat the virus in the hardest-hit areas.

"We can raise people from their deathbeds with these medications, " Professor of Medicine Bruce D. Walker said when the statement was first released. Walker was a co-signatory of the statement.

The statement put pressure on pharmaceutical companies to make their products less expensive so poor countries can afford them.

"A university with a $19.2 billion endowment should say we are also part of global civil society," Sachs said at the time.

Sachs has a history of speaking out on the cause of fighting AIDS in poor countries.

On Nov. 30, he took part in a panel discussion at the ARCO Forum on the impact of AIDS in Africa and the complexity of trying to fight it.

Sachs stressed the need for cheaper drugs as part of a coherent plan by which Western nations can address the AIDS crisis.

Contacted by e-mail in Beijing last week, Sachs says the Consensus Statement has had an "enormous" effect on policymakers across the world, in particular in the U.S. government and the U.N.

"It had a big effect in pushing forward the argument that it is time to scale up dramatically the use of antiretroviral therapies in poor countries," he says.

On Feb. 6, Sachs kicked off a speakers' series on "AIDS in Africa" that was co-sponsored by his Center for International Development and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, affiliated with the Kennedy School.

In the audience that night was one of his students from the Kennedy School, G. Imani Duncan. She says the positive response to the speech, along with other conversations and experiences with AIDS she has had in her native Jamaica led her to decide the time was right to take action on the issue.

"A group of us at the Kennedy School thought this could be something very powerful," she says.

Building An NGO

A soon-to-be graduate of the Masters of Public Administration at the Kennedy School, Duncan co-founded "Global Justice" as a non-governmental organization (NGO) to "mobilize students in the U.S. with students internationally to promote global justice and responsibility through education, advocacy and better public policies."

The first big choice for Global Choice, however, was what cause they should take up first.

They considered food security, education, the environment and AIDS. In the end, she decided with Taylor and Sachs that the best issue to take on is AIDS.

"We chose the AIDS campaign because we thought it was coming to the fore," she says. "It best encompassed the various inequalities of poverty--if you are poor, you will die."

She says she was motivated to found the group with fellow Kennedy School student Adam R. Taylor for a variety of reasons.

Taylor had spent last summer in Zambia and saw the ravages of the disease.

"For him, because he saw it first hand, he could communicate it so well," she says.

She also describes how her experience in Jamaica in December changed how she thought about the AIDS crisis.

"I went home in December to Jamaica thinking about what I could do," she says. "I went to work at a clinic and talked with people to see how they got access to drugs. They were dying when AIDS is a disease that one can live with in a dignified way."

The group subsequently launched the Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC) with seed money from the Carr Foundation.

The main focus of the group this spring has been contacting students at other universities to organize groups in letter-writing campaigns to Congress.

"We want to organize schools across the states to write 100,000 letters to Congress to appropriate $2.5 billion for AIDS in Africa prevention and treatment programs as well as community infrastructure programs," she says.

Along with Wikler's HAC, SGAC encouraged about 7,000 Harvard students to send letters before the end of the school year, Duncan says.

Members of HAC and the SGAC traveled to Washington on May 5 to learn the basics of lobbying the government. The tactics of letter writing and direct lobbying sets the student apart from the academic methods used by the Harvard faculty to pressure action on the issue.

"We don't want to do the university-student partnership," Duncan says. "We want to keep Global Justice as a distinct entity from Harvard University. Although it began at the Kennedy School, it's a separate entity."

A New AIDS Activism

Organizations such as the Harvard AIDS Institute and Partners AIDS Research Center at Mass. General Hospital that coordinate AIDS research at the University have existed for years.

Instead of working within an established academic framework, the newest student groups have different methods of pressuring the U.S. government to spend more money on the AIDS crisis.

"Campus activism can be critical," says Marc Jacobson, a member of SGAC and a student at the Kennedy School. "Students have shown in the past to be leaders on other issues. They are really motivated by moral concerns."

Although the magnitude of the AIDS epidemic in Africa has been known for years, both HAC and SGAC were formed just this year.

Wikler, who says he was not involved with AIDS activism until this fall, says he is not sure why there has been an upswing in interest. He speculates that increased attention in the media has played a role.

The issue of AIDS in Africa has also been taken up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan. Last month, President Bush pledged $200 million for a global trust fund to fight AIDS. Congress budgeted $460 million for global AIDS programs this year.

"The public attention has risen tremendously in the past year for many reasons, including the work at Harvard, but of course mainly because of the rapid advance of the pandemic and the availability of life-saving drugs that are still not being used," Sachs writes in an email.

Sachs says he has "detected a large shift in views during the past year in favor of a much more radical global response."

Behind that response, however, are countless personal stories of what drew people to the cause.

"I think what motivated me to work on it was the sense that this is the greatest threat to human life in our time," he says. "And it costs so little to do it."

"We saw a rising interest in Harvard students," Duncan says. "Harvard is not a very activist campus, so we were emboldened by it."

Amir Attaran, an international health researcher at Sachs' Center for International Development, praises the student activism on the issue of AIDS.

"Students can be very, very effective in influencing how American aid money is spent-or not-on diseases of the poor," Attaran writes in an e-mail. "We are really glad to see their efforts underway."

Sachs says student activism is "having a big effect in our community, on campuses around the country, and it is increasingly being heard in Washington and Africa."

Duncan, who will be in Cambridge this summer working at Global Justice, similarly couched the cause in moral terms.

"What we're doing is finishing the work of the civil rights movement," she says.

--Staff writer Jonathan H. Esensten can be reached at esensten@fas.harvard.edu.