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Let me just make three quick points. The first is--and these are more general points. The first is that it's important to recognize-- [tape change] --the debate. And what we're talking about is treatment. We weren't talking about that a couple of years ago. So almost overnight, we have dramatically shifted the debate, and that's important to remember.

But not just treatment. The other aspects of the program--providing care to orphans, there are millions of children who have been orphaned, that's important. Providing palliative care, helping people that we can't get to quickly enough and they're going to die. We owe it to them to make sure that they die with some dignity and respect. The prevention elements of the program.

So this initiative--as Jim said, I traveled with him in Africa in December and I was there in August as well--it has really brought a sense of enormous hope, and it's important for us not to forget that. But, you know, we should not confuse efforts with results. We have to make sure that we get the plan right, that we get the implementation right. And that's why I think the discussion about treatment, and particularly drugs, is so important.

We had a long discussion within the Presidential Advisory Council On HIV and AIDS about this subject about a month and a half ago, had some people come in to talk to us, experts. And it's interesting--a group of diverse people from all across the country, on hearing the evidence, came down on the side of a very simple approach to this. The U.S. is about to embark on a $15 billion program. Almost half of it's going to be for treatment and a huge portion of that is going to be to buy drugs. So the issue is do we buy drugs that we know are safe, or do we take a chance?

Now, this is the president's emergency plan for AIDS relief, so we are in an emergency. And there is a good, sound argument that when you're in an emergency, you ought to take chances, you ought to take risks--if they are absolutely necessary. But if you don't have to take a risk, then you shouldn't. And so the issue is we can buy drugs with U.S. funds that we know work, that have been tested; and we can buy drugs that we aren't sure about.

Now, if the price were really an enormous problem and the only way we could really treat the numbers of people we want to treat is to take a risk and use cheaper drugs, then that would be a consideration. But as you heard from Carol, it's just not the case. The facts don't support that. So if you are in a dilemma, should we take the risk or not, one factor is price. Okay, the evidence doesn't support the price is worth us taking the risk.

Well, then you might say, well, at least if they're equally safe, if, as some organizations--like the World Health Organization has asserted that certain drugs are safe even though they have not been through a regulatory process that we would require before we would give those drugs to our families, the people that we love and we care about in this country, you might say, well, at least if they're safe we ought to go ahead and consider it. But as Scott has said, that is a huge question mark. Huge question mark.

So if you just look at what we know, there is really no reason for us to take that risk. The challenge we face in the short term in implementing the emergency plan--and by "the short term" I mean the next year to two years--is not a funding problem, because there's plenty of money because of the U.S., and it is not a price problem. It is really an infrastructure problem. Our challenge is how are we going to deliver treatment to people who live in places where frequently there's no electricity, no running water, no health infrastructure--you know, either physical structures like hospitals and clinics or health care workers, nurses, doctors, those sorts of people. How do we implement a program of this complexity is--that's the challenge that we face.

So I actually offered a resolution for the President's Advisory Council to--and it was passed unanimously by the council--asking the president to direct Ambassador Tobias and his team that they should buy drugs that have been tested and that there should be no double standard, that Africans deserve drugs that are as safe and efficacious as we would give to the people that we love here in the U.S. And we can afford to have that standard.

There's no reason for a double standard. So that's the first point I want to make.

The second point I want to quickly make is about encouraging all of us to try to change the dynamic or the discussion about the role of research-based pharmaceuticals. The only good thing that has happened in this 20-plus-year epidemic, the only good thing, is that we have drugs that work. I remember when--I'm old enough to remember when, in the '80s, when we didn't. I lost an enormous number of friends and family members. And it was a terrible time, when there was no choice. People got sick and everyone sort of knew that there was really not--there was no option for them.

But the drugs that we have now, they work. They keep people alive, they're able to raise their families, to live good lives. We owe it to the people who are on therapy now, we owe it to the millions of Africans that, with the president's plan, we're going to put on therapy, we owe it to them to do everything we can to create an environment where new drugs will be created. As important as the generic manufacturers are to the overall process, their importance is secondary to the role that innovator companies play.

Almost everyone who is on an anti-retroviral today is, at some point in the next one to five to 10 years, going to become resistant to the drugs. Because of resistance, the drugs that they're on can no longer be useful. And as we put millions more people on therapy, you know, we're--right now in the whole world there's less then a million people on therapy. We're about to go from a million, if we achieve our goal, to 3 to 4 million over the next five years. We don't know what's going to happen with resistance. But we know based on--we don't know, because of those numbers, what's going to happen, but what we know based on the existing people on treatment is that resistance is going to increase dramatically.

We need new drugs. We need them quickly, we need a whole battery of them. And there's really only one way we're going to get those new drugs, and that is the research-based manufacturers have to stay in this therapeutic category. There are very few firms that do research and market AIDS drugs. And as Roger Bate can tell you--he's done a study--the number is decreasing as we sit here. And as Jim said, why would you do that? If you were a company, why not go and make Viagra? I mean, no one's protesting the price of Viagra. Go make heart drugs or anti-anxiety drugs or cancer drugs. There's all sorts of things that people could do. But why would people--I've talked to people both on the research side and industry side. They get treated in horrible ways. Why would you want to be in this business? And if you add to that, there's no money to be made in it, why would investors and--

So you get my point. We've got to find a way to change the debate so that the question that we are asking ourselves and that policy makers are asking us, how do we incentivize research-based pharms to stay in this market? How do we make it attractive for them? How do we make it profitable for them? How do we make it a therapeutic category that they want to stay in?

Because when we put people on therapy, we have to recognize that there is no--based on the best scientists in the world--there is no cure on the horizon for this disease. There's no cure on the horizon. And so we make, I think, a--it's a moral commitment to people when we put them on therapy. We've got to have options for them five years from now, 10 years from now.

So my point is, yes, we need to save lives today and that's what this plan is all about, but we've got to figure out a way to save lives today but do it in a way that allows us, or at least enhances our ability to save lives five years from now and 10 years from now. Because there are a lot of lives that are going to have to be saved five and 10 years from now. That's my second point.

My third and final point is just the importance of U.S. leadership. The whole situation around global AIDS has dramatically changed in the last year and a half, since the U.S. decided that it was actually going to lead the effort to fight global AIDS. For a long time the world looked at this problem and sort of wrung its hands and people said, you know, it's a terrible thing and people are dying, you know, it's--they looked at the numbers, you know, 65 million people infected, 20 million already dead, about 45 million people--and people can quibble about numbers, but that's about right, 45 million people living with HIV today. More than half of those live in Subsaharan Africa. Every year about 3 million people die of HIV, every day about 6,000. And every day, according to the U.N., 17,000 new infections.

What that means is, as horrible as it's been, the worst is yet to come. Tens and tens and tens and tens of millions of people--and the world, I think, partly because it was Africans--I mean, I think that that's part of the reason why the response was so slow. If it had been perhaps in the developed world, maybe the response would be a little faster. But the world sort of sat around and did next to nothing.

I think the good news, though, and it's something that we shouldn't forget as we wrestle with the implementation of the president's emergency plan, this new U.S. effort--as we try to get the implementation right, we should not forget the big picture, which is that our country has finally stepped up and decided to lead. And we didn't wait for any other country to do it, finally. We didn't say, well, you know, we're going to wait for other countries to do their part. Fortunately, we decided--and I think the president deserves a lot of credit for it, the Congress deserves a lot of credit for it, but fundamentally it's the American people, because they are footing the bill. And realistically, it's a big bill. You know, this is a five-year plan. But let's face it, there's no cure in five years. And I don't think this is the kind of country that's going to walk away from a commitment.

So this is a large new foreign aid commitment that our country is making. It is a wonderful story of compassion and generosity and ingenuity. Because it's such a complex problem, part of the reason the world didn't respond, I think--part of it was people didn't want to spend the money, but the other part of it was it's so complex, it's so daunting that it paralyzes you. There is no other country in the world that would make this kind of commitment in terms of funding and implementation. And if you think about it, ask yourself what other country, even today, would step up and make this kind of commitment. There's not one.

So in closing, I think it's really important for us to find ways to make sure that we are telling the American people this story. They need to know it, because they're paying for it. And like with any huge foreign initiative, there are going to problems. There are going to be screw-ups. I think we've got to be patient with Ambassador Tobias and his people. You know, no one's ever done this. No nation has ever tried to do something this complex. So we need to be patient with each other, patient with our government.

But at the end of the day, the American people need to be told in every way possible--and I'll make a little pitch here--we've got to--we've done a film called "Stepping Up: America Responds to Global AIDS." We're trying to get the story out. The American people need to understand what their country is doing, what they are doing, because it is the reason that we are here and it's the reason why there is hope where once there was despair. And we don't get many wonderful stories, but this is one of them and we ought to not be shy about telling it.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

MR. GLASSMAN: Thank you, Abner.

This sounds like, so we decided to do this on our own without waiting for everyone else. This sounds like an example of U.S. unilateralism that we hear so much about.

[Laughter.]

Just one really quick question and we'll go to the floor. You've been to Africa several times and you made this movie, which is coming out when?

MR. MASON: It's July 6th here in Washington.

MR. GLASSMAN: Great. So--but you've talked to Africans about this issue, this double-standard issue. It's a story we don't hear very much. But there is concern from Africans about taking untested drugs?

MR. MASON: Absolutely. We were recently in Uganda, actually in August, and we went to the Joint Center for Clinical Research. It's actually one of the largest providers of antiretroviral therapy in all of Subsaharan Africa. It's in Uganda, in Kampala. And we talked with the patients and health care workers there, and we asked them, you know, we said what do you--there's a debate about drugs and what kind of drugs you should be using and that sort of thing, and one patient in particular looked me in the eye and he said, I want what you use. Whatever you use, that's what I want.

And they got it. It's a fairly simple way to approach it. Because what I think we want for Africans is what we want for our own families, you know, what I want for each of you, what you hopefully would want for me, and that's drugs that have a high standard, high quality, they're effective, and that people can be sure that what they think they're taking is what they're taking.