The Tribune

By AVA TURNQUEST

Tribune Chief Reporter

aturnquest@tribunemedia.net

THE termination of American HIV/AIDS relief funding for the country this year will have no impact on local efforts to combat the disease, Minister of Health Dr Perry Gomez insisted yesterday.

Following US President Donald Trump’s directive to slash foreign aid this fiscal year, the United States’ President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has reportedly ordered fund terminations across the region - with the Bahamas listed as first in line to see its funding cut entirely in September.

According to Antillean Media Group, PEPFAR directors said the global fund could no longer justify supporting upper middle-income Caribbean countries.

The article, published on April 14, states that the next country to see its funding terminated will be Barbados in 2018, while Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad & Tobago will face funding reductions over the next two years until their allocation ends in 2019.

Yesterday, Dr Gomez explained that the country has historically been self-reliant in the funding of its programmes for HIV/AIDs relief and prevention.

“The support here over the years,” Dr Gomez said, “in contrast to the rest of the region, we’ve always been kind of out there by ourselves in funding our programme. In fact in the early days in the height of it we got no support. It wasn’t until (former US President) Bill Clinton came here and we got support from the Clinton Foundation indirectly because he negotiated prices for drugs for us, that was very helpful, but we never got direct funding for that.”

The Tribune’s attempts to speak with representatives from PEPFAR’s local office have been unsuccessful over the past few days.

Dr Gomez could not confirm the value of funding allocated for the country yesterday.

Former director of the National HIV Programme of The Bahamas, he is well known for his pioneering work.

Asked whether there would be a direct impact, he said: “No, the government has been funding our programme for years. We never really totally depended on foreign countries to do our programme, unlike a lot of the rest of the region. That’s how we got a head start on them because the government was prepared to put the money into drugs, and many of them (other countries) said they couldn’t afford it and got started too late.”

The PEPFAR cuts are part of $18 billion in reductions proposed by the Trump administration for this fiscal year, according to Bloomberg, which noted that AIDS assistance worldwide would face cuts of nearly $300m, and National Institutes of Health-funded research would be slashed by $1.23 billion.

“The spending proposal is part of a wider agenda set out by Trump,” Bloomberg reports, “who has outlined a series of reductions in non-military programmes for the next fiscal year.

“It’s up to Congress to set spending levels, and many of the more drastic measures are unlikely to become law. Legislators never approved a full budget for fiscal 2017, so instead the government is operating under short-term funding legislation that expires April 28.”

Other proposed US health cuts for the current year, according to Bloomberg, include: $40m from staffing funds at the Food and Drug Administration; $50m from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; $350m from research grants at the National Science Foundation; and $372m from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Programme.