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"As of 2003, there were nearly 27 million men, women, and children suffering from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Today that number has been reduced by more than half. The number of people with access to antiretroviral drugs--a treatment which renders AIDS survivable rather than fatal--has gone from around 50,000 to more than 11 million. All of this is thanks to a Bush administration program known as PEPFAR. Even on the day of its launch during the 2003 State of the Union, no one much noticed it. It cost a fraction of a percentage of the overall budget and was far less expensive than the Iraq war, effectively announced on the same day. Yet PEPFAR is, according to journalist Emily Bass, "the best thing America has done beyond our borders in this century." To End a Plague is not merely a history of this extraordinary program; it describes the cost of success in our broken political system. PEPFAR was likely a cynical political ploy--a "legislative trophy" as the New York Times described it--and its overseers, including the now-famous Coronavirus Task Force leader Deborah Birx--had to make moral and political compromises to keep it from being shut down. Yet the program has persevered and made an enormous improvement in millions of lives. This is the story of true change and what it takes to make it"--
About the author
Emily Bass has spent more than twenty years writing about and working on HIV/AIDS in America and East and Southern Africa. Her writing has appeared in numerous books and publications including Foreign Policy, TheWashington Post, The Lancet, Esquire, and n+1, and she has received a notable mention in Best American Essays. A lifelong social justice activist, Bass has served as an external expert for the World Health Organization and a member of the What Would an HIV Doula Do collective. She is the recipient of a Fulbright journalism fellowship and a Martin Duberman Visiting Research Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Summary
Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize
“Randy Shilts and Laurie Garrett told the story of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through the late 1980s and the early 1990s, respectively. Now journalist-historian-activist Emily Bass tells the story of US engagement in HIV/AIDS control in sub-Saharan Africa. There is far to go on the path, but Bass tells us how far we’ve come.” —Sten H. Vermund, professor and dean, Yale School of Public Health
With his 2003 announcement of a program known as PEPFAR, George W. Bush launched an astonishingly successful American war against a global pandemic. PEPFAR played a key role in slashing HIV cases and AIDS deaths in sub-Saharan Africa, leading to the brink of epidemic control. Resilient in the face of flatlined funding and political headwinds, PEPFAR is America’s singular example of how to fight long-term plague—and win.
To End a Plague is not merely the definitive history of this extraordinary program; it traces the lives of the activists who first impelled President Bush to take action, and later sought to prevent AIDS deaths at the whims of American politics. Moving from raucous street protests to the marbled halls of Washington and the clinics and homes where Ugandan people living with HIV fight to survive, it reveals an America that was once capable of real and meaningful change—and illuminates imperatives for future pandemic wars. Exhaustively researched and vividly written, this is the true story of an American moonshot.
