Bush’s Slowdown on AIDS

President Bush’s failure to name the last two members of the National Commission on AIDS is delaying activation of the commission, and that, in turn, is handicapping national efforts to spur programs to control the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS.

The White House has explained the delay as inevitable, given the heavy burden of new appointments required of a new administration, but it may also reflect a struggle by persons on the radical right to impose their choice on the President. The commission was to have been activated last December after adoption of omnibus AIDS legislation in Congress, but that was an unrealistic goal that would have deprived both the new Administration and the new Congress elected in November a voice in the decision. Since then, Congress has made its 10 selections, and they have drawn praise from concerned groups. Three of the President’s appointees are mandated by law to be the secretaries of defense, health and human services, and veterans affairs. It is the two remaining vacancies on the President’s list that are causing the delay.

Former President Reagan’s Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, under the chairmanship of Adm. James Watkins, demonstrated the value of a commission in guiding national policy and discouraging the extremism that has been stirred from time to time by this disease.But little of the action program adopted by the Watkins’ commission has been implemented, and, in the 11 months that have passed since then, the disease has continued to spread at an alarming rate.

“There’s just all kinds of things that we need to be dealing with from a policy standpoint that we’re not dealing with,” Rep. J. Roy Rowland (D-Ga.), sponsor of the law creating the commission, commented recently.

The House has chosen as its five commission appointees Rowland, Diane Ahrens, chairman of the Ramsey County, Minn., board of commissioners that established an AIDS task force in St. Paul; Rev. Scott Allen, Baptist minister and coordinator of the AIDS Inter-Faith Network in Dallas; Dr. Don C. Des Jarlais, coordinator, AIDS research, New York state division of substance abuse services, and Dr. Donald S. Goldman, attorney, of Livington, N.J., who has written and lectured on legal and ethical aspects of AIDS.

The Senate appointees are Eunice Diaz, director of community affairs at White Memorial Medical Center and vice-chairman elect of the Los Angeles County AIDS Commission; Larry Kessler, founder of the Boston AIDS Action Committee; Dr. June Osborn, dean of the University of Michigan school of public health; Harry Dalton, law professor at Yale University and an authority on AIDS legal issues, and Dr. Charles Konigsberg, director of the health division of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.