Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm delighted today to be talking with my very old and dear friend, Peter Wainer, about the current crisis. Pete and I go way back. I served in the Reagan administration. You served in the George W. Bush

administration. You were much more high ranking than I was. I have to confess, you know. But I did have a blue

pass, which allowed me to go anywhere. That was because I worked for the First Lady. Anyway,

welcome, Pete. Good to see you.

Great to be with you, Moena. Thank you. And thanks for your voice in these disorienting times.

Ditto, right back at you. All right. For our viewers and listeners who may not be familiar with this, I'd like to go back a little bit and talk about PEPFAR. It's been in the

news, obviously, lately, because it was part of USAID and it's now discontinued. And you were there

when this program was initiated under George W. Bush. The estimates range widely, but it is certainly

tens of millions of people whose lives have been saved by this program. So I want to begin with

you taking us through how it began and why.

I mean, you know, if you listen to many analysts these days, they'll say,

you couldn't possibly get such a program off the ground.

It basically helps poor people in countries far away. We get nothing out of it.

Why would we do such a thing? Yeah. I'm happy to talk about it because PEPFAR is one of the great

success stories in the American story, certainly from a humanitarian perspective.

And the context is that there was a terrible outbreak of AIDS on primarily the African continent

in the late 90s, early 2000s. And there would be places like Uganda, they would refer to these roads as

coffin rows because they were just having to build coffins. It was essentially a HIV

AIDS was a death sentence. And so in the Bush administration, we had conversations with people, Mark Dybul, who was a brilliant

scientists at the National Institutes of Health, Tony Fauci, who was at NIH at that point as well,

and specialists in infectious diseases and others,

some from the outside. The singer-songwriter Bono had an interest in this topic as well.

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