Condom Colonialism

George Bush has gotten very little credit in the MSM for his unprecedented USAIDS initiative. It is unprecedented in at least two ways: the sheer size of the financial commitment, and in the results it is producing. On the latter, it is particularly striking how effective the USAIDS efforts have been when compared against the vastly more expensive and longer ongoing U.N. efforts.

The U.N. has, predictably, objected strongly to the USAIDS initiative as unilateral and driven by a religious motive. The latter criticism derives from the fact that USAIDS is funding efforts to promote abstinence and faithfulness, particularly in Uganda, where the government has been very supportive. Oh, by the way — something you may not have read in the MSM — these efforts in Uganda have been stunningly effective in reducing the rate of AIDS in that country.

Mark Steyn tackles this precise issue in his new column about "condom colonialism". An excerpt:

But, after two decades, condom colonialism seems to have done nothing for southern Africa. The latest "conventional wisdom" among western do-gooders — that rapacious pharmaceutical companies should have their patents stolen in the interests of supplying cheap generic drugs to the continent — is also supported by Stephen Lewis and WHO. If condom worship is largely ineffectual, Big Pharma demonization has the potential to be utterly disastrous. Already, "pre-qualified" cheap AIDS drugs made in India have had to be "de-listed" by WHO, when they were subsequently revealed not to have met even WHO's minimal standards, by which time they were already widely circulated all around Africa. As things turned out, they weren't even cheaper--and the principal result seems likely to be not healthy Africans but Africans who develop strains of AIDS resistant to western drugs, while western pharmaceutical companies have less and less interest in developing drugs for those new strains if their patents are going to be stolen by the transnational establishment.

The Bush initiative, on the other hand, ensures African HIV sufferers will receive drugs that meet U.S. standards.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Related: It strikes me (a very non-religious guy) as kind of scary for the U.N. to take the position that promoting abstinence and faithfulness is wrong because it is (supposedly) based in religion. Scary on two counts: that the organization supposedly representing the world's people would discount the religions that so many of those people (though not me) believe in, and that the organization would dismiss the promotion of a behavior effective in reducing disease simply because the behavior corresponds with a moral standard whose parentage they believe (whether correctly or incorrectly) is religion. What the hell is the U.N. doing making judgments on such matters?