Amfar's cinematic victory lap....

  Every once in awhile, I'll be sitting there watching something on HBO and I'll get so flustered by the the obvious political pandering of the content that I'll have to control my urge to launch my shiny HD TV into oblivion.  HBO'S latest entry into the political self congratulation archives was a short mini documentary on AMFAR or The American Foundation For Aids Research.  If you watched this special, you'd think that AMFAR had rendered the AIDS disease to nothing more than a tragic footnote in the annuals of medical history.  While the upper crust ate champagne and dined on their self delusions, actress Sharon Stone was see in one segment touting AMFAR'S horn as if they had plowed the road towards a cure.  Last time I checked, a cure for AIDS was nowhere in sight and people were still dying of this dreaded disease.  To hear the subjects in the documentary tell it, AMFAR has somehow unlocked scientific doors to the very nature of AIDS and how to attack it.  Last I heard scientists had been struggling with another strain of AIDS.  A strain that had become resistant to the very HIV/AIDS drugs that AMFAR says they had a hand in developing.  Is this where we're at in terms of the outlook on AIDS; people promising better tomorrows while they hand out so called wonder pills and don't worry be happy buttons?  This isn't the time for self congratulations.  The war against HIV/AIDS isn't over and if organizations like AMFAR think there's nothing left to fight for on this front, then they're simply delusional or too in love with their own press clippings to know better. 

  Still, that's not even what put the proverbial bee in my bonnet.   It's the fact that the film makers, predictably, drudge up the name of Ryan White to prop up AMFAR as some sort of do gooding organization for AIDS research.  As we all know, we can never let facts get in the way of a mutual admiration society.  Those facts being that Ryan White only became a poster boy for the AIDS movement because he was the victim of blatant bean counting by the blood industry.  The blood industry, god bless them, felt that cost was more prevalent than prevention and or public safety when AIDS was in its embryo stages and victims like Ryan White were being infected by the very blood that was supposed to save their lives.  Yet, there is AMFAR and their minions taking credit for the HIV blood testing system that is currently in place.  The very system that was begrudgingly put into action after organizations like the Red Cross knew they had to deal with the shit storm that would soon follow.  But again, let's not let the facts of a brutal epidemic with no end in sight get in the way of an AIDS organization and its need for a victory lap.  Make it a quick one AMFAR, there's till work to be done.  There are still lives being lost.  There are still stigmas that need to be tackled and there are still lives to be saved.