Diary Prequel Package — page 58

what we are doing. How can we not favor a certain plan if we have been working on this problem for months??? Oct. 10, 2002 - Had 2 important meetings at the White House today: First - meeting with Gary Edson, Jay Lefkowitz and Robin Cleveland about the comprehensive AIDS implementation plan for prevention, treatment, and care for developing nations for possible consideration by the President. This was in response to a call from Jay about 1 week ago asking to spread out the plan from 5 years to 7 years and to calculate how much money would be spent for each prevention intervention, i.e. condom distribution versus sex worker education versus needle exchange versus family counseling. The point is that they feel that the request might be too much for the 5 years (Total = $9.987 billion over 5 years, including up to $1.0 billion for the Global Fund). They want us to spread it out so that the early years will be less. Also, they want us to assume that countries other than Russia, China, and India (which will contribute 50%) would be contributing some proportion. We figured Botswana and South Africa could contribute 30% each Namibia and Guyana 20% and Uganda 10%. Furthermore, they anticipate that the President is going to ask just what the money is going for and if it is for Condoms, sex workers and IV drug users, he should at least know that. Obviously, the right wing in the WH would be against this. We crunched the number and I presented this. Right off Robin mentioned that Jim Capretta (OMB PAD) had mentioned to Mitch Daniels that something was cooking vis-à-vis international AIDS and that this would require new money. Mitch immediately said no chance and that no matter what we give, we will be criticized. Robin then left for another meeting. I suggested to Jay and Gary that another alternative would be to do this through the Global fund with the stipulation that they work from our plan with suggestions from them. My reason was as follows. The WHO group just met in Geneva with Bernard Schwartlander to try to galvanize a plan and support for a global program. Mark Dybul went to that meeting. It appears that they will ask for a 3 year plan to treat 3 million people at a cost of $10-15 billion with $4.6 billion from USA. They want to announce this on World AIDS Day (Dec. 1). This could pre-empt the President. In other words, we will be pressured to give $4.6 billion to do someone else's plan. This would be less that our 5 year and 7 year plan. Why not announce that we will give $4.6 million to the global fund if they coordinate their activities through our plan? The President could announce this and get credit for leadership as well as for contributing to the Global AIDS Fund. Also, it would avoid the impression that we Americans are going off on our own. Gary and Jay liked the plan very much and asked me to put together a 3-pager for Josh Bolten. They made me swear to tell no one about this, not even Mark, Terrell or TGT. I finally convinced them that I really needed to tell Mark since he is necessary to put these things together. I am very uncomfortable about not telling Terrell. Second meeting was a briefing of Vice President Cheney's Staff on the NIAID efforts on biodefense, i.e. what is our "vision" for spending the $1.75 billion as well as our longterm vision. At the meeting were Carol Kuntz, Seth Carus and Noreen Hynes (all from Cheney's senior staff) and Jerry Hauer (from the DHHS). The meeting went extremely well. I wowed them with a passionately delivered presentation. I told them that we at NIAID could transform the way the country deals with bioterrorism threat from a