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HIV activists organize fight back

Published Mar 16, 2005 1:13 PM

People living with HIV/AIDS and their supporters gathered March 5 at the Arlington Street Church in Boston to declare war, not on the people of Iraq or Afghanistan, but on the high prices for drugs and government censorship of effective HIV-prevention programs.

Call to Action, a grassroots group of activists, organized the event to initiate a renewed, militant response to the continual under-funding of HIV programs and the criminal redistribution of money to the war in Iraq. Speakers and participants at the conference came from the Cam bridge Health Alliance, the Multicultural AIDS Coalition, the Southern New Hamp shire HIV/AIDS Task Force, the Fenway Community Health Center, Local 26 Hotel Workers Union, the Inter na tional Action Center from both Providence and Boston, and GayLab.


From left to right: James Adams,
GayLab; Gerry Scoppettuolo, IAC;
John Powell, So. NH AIDS Task
Force; Gail Beverley, Fenway
Community Health Center.

Glenn Williams, an African American gay man living with HIV, struck the key note of the meeting: “ I have had tremendous support to be alive today. When I see these resources being cut, I see people where I was at 10 years ago and I worry about them. We can’t allow funds to be cut. Immigration policies make it hard for some people to take an HIV test. If people are deported, they are getting a death sentence.”

Ed Childs, chief shop steward of Local 26 Hotel Workers, expressed greetings from the union president, Janice Loux, and also spoke out against HIV immigration policies. “Our members are immigrants that have come from countries that have been colonized and occupied and are deeply affected by AIDS. “

These sentiments were echoed by Gail Beverley, longtime HIV-prevention worker at Boston’s Fenway Community Health Center, who runs a group for people newly-diagnosed with HIV. “For people with HIV,” she said, “it’s a struggle every day to pay the rent and put food on the table”.

The Boston region received an 8.1-percent cutback in critical federal Ryan White Title I funding just days before Call to Action’s event. This amounted to over $1.2 million. The Boston Living Center, which provides the most direct services to people with HIV in greater Boston has had to endure cutbacks to its basic services, as have other AIDS Service organizations. Bush’s Fiscal Year 2006 budget also calls for a $14 million cut in the AIDS Housing Program (HOPWA).

Many speakers at the conference pledged to carry the Stonewall Warrior’s “Money for AIDS, not For War” banner to the March 19 anti-war demonstration in New York City. Call to Action explicitly condemns the Iraq war and the $10 million per hour it steals from necessary human-needs funding. One of the workshops at the conference documented that Merck, Abbott, Glaxo-Smith-Kline and several other pharmaceutical manufacturers of HIV antivirals had after-tax, after-investment, after-research and development net profits of $63 billion in just two years (2003 and 2003).

The conference concluded with planning to organize militant and visible opposition to the current crisis in the next few weeks starting with a contingent at the March 19 Anti-War March in New York City. For more info: Gerry Scoppettuolo (781) 273-1689, [email protected]