Ezekiel J. Emanuel, center, White House global health advisor
Ezekiel J. Emanuel, head of the Department of Bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health and a breast oncologist, is on extended detail as a special advisor for health policy to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
But that doesn’t speak to his impact. He is one of the architects of the Obama administration’s Global Health Initiative, and he has been a lightning rod of criticism for activists who want a much more vigorous global AIDS response from the administration.
Emanuel spoke to John Donnelly on Saturday about how the Obama administration now needs better ideas for making global health programs more efficient, and how he won’t shy away from taking on AIDS activists. “I have two brothers and all we do is disagree,’’ he said.
Q: You haven’t been shy in pushing back on criticism from AIDS activists about the Obama administration’s smaller increases in the global AIDS budgets than under the Bush administration. What really upsets you?
A: We can have disagreements about the right policy, which way we are going forward, but we can’t have a disagreement about the facts – the facts of the budget. A number of advocates are saying we are cutting the PEPFAR budget. The fact is funding for HIV and our work on PEPFAR is going up – in 2009 2010 and 2011. That is matter of fact. You may not like the allocation we have made, or not like the pot we are putting it in, but (saying we are) cutting the budget is wrong.
The second thing is [the notion] that somehow I am `anti-HIV,’ or `anti-work-we-are-doing-on-HIV,’ is absolutely wrong. This development of the [Global Health Initiative (GHI)] is building on everything we have done, using what our work in HIV and malaria has shown us. One of the things that we have shown is that you can take complicated medical interventions, get them working in rural areas — including sophisticated techniques like measuring T cell and viral loads — and monitor people. A lot of what we have put into the GHI is built on the foundation of PEPFAR. We want to broaden it.
And (another thing) is that we have a moral obligation to the people we are trying to help that if we are spending money on things that are not efficient, we have to be more efficient. There is a moral obligation from the community (working in AIDS issues) not to just ask for more money, but to say, `We have this pot of money, how are we going to do the most with it?’
We’re not doing this because we are green-eyeshade, no-morals people. It’s because we want to save lives and spend money most efficiently.
Q: Still, Ambassador Eric Goosby told Science Speaks this week that even with efficiencies, there will be a `mismatch’ between funds and the need.
Science Speaks: HIV & TB News 