Obama lifts HIV/AIDS travel and immigration ban
Ryan White, Sping of 1989.
On Friday, in the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House, President Barack Obama signed the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act of 2009, a bill that lifts a 22-year-old travel and immigration ban on HIV-positive people and people with AIDS. Congress and the President completed a journey started during the Bush Administration which once finalized on Monday with publication in the Federal Register, will mean that at the beginning of next year, the United States will no longer be a member of the dirty dozen of countries that had banned HIV-positive travelers and immigrants, according to the advocacy group Immigration Equality, the remaining 11 homophobic countries are: Armenia, Brunei, Iraq, Libya, Moldova, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Sudan.
The signing ceremony was attended by Jeanne White-Ginder, mother of Ryan White, the Indiana teenager who contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion at age 13. A severe hemophiliac since diagnosed at six-days-old, Ryan White received transfusions of Factor VIII, a blood product created from pooled plasma of non-hemophiliacs, an increasingly common treatment for hemophiliacs at the time.
On December 17th, 1984, at a time when very little was known about AIDS, White was diagnosed with AIDS during a partial lung removal surgery as a result of pneumonia. Despite public declarations by his doctor that Ryan posed no threat in cases of casual contact to anyone around him, Ryan White's diagnosis and subsequent losing fight to return to Western Middle School in Russiaville, Indiana pushed him into the national spotlight and began a national dialogue on the treatment of AIDS and HIV-positive people. Prior to the awareness Ryan White's story brought about, AIDS was widely considered primarily an LGBT problem that didn't affect the "normal" heterosexual community. He died five years later at the age of 18, in April of 1990.
In 1987, during the Regan-era of conservatism, led by the Department of Health and Human Services with support from Senator Jesse Helms, R-NC, and then passed unanimously in the Senate, AIDS was added to the list of diseases that could disqualify a person from entering the United States, reflecting the fear and ignorance about the disease and its transmission at the time. In 1991, the department tried to reverse its decision, but Congress opposed the action with intensive lobbying by conservative groups and two years later, made HIV infection the only disease specifically listed under immigration law as grounds for inadmissibility to the United States. This law has kept out students, tourists, refugees and even wanted adoptive children who are HIV-positive. But it has also kept any major international AIDS conferences from taking place in the U.S. since 1993 because HIV-positive activists and researchers could not be granted entry.
In August of 1990, the legacy of Ryan White's short life and tragic death four moths earlier prompted Congress to pass the Ryan White Care Act, which provided a funding mechanism for assistance to low-income AIDS patients as a "payer of last resort" for treatment and care not paid for by another means. The bill signed by President Obama on Friday, is the fourth reauthorization of the act, and extends it for another four years.
In 2008, the Senate in a bipartisan effort led by Senator John Kerry, D-MA, and then-Senator Gordon H. Smith, R-OR, voted to overturn the ban as part of legislation reauthorizing funding for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, (PEPFAR), signed into law on July 30th, 2008, by President George W. Bush.
President Obama said:
Now in the past policy differences have made reauthorizations of this program divisive and controversial, that didn't happen this year. For that, the members of Congress who are here today deserve extraordinary credit for passing this bill in the bipartisan manner that it deserves.
More excerpts from remarks by President Barack Obama at the signing of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act of 2009, October 30th, 2009:
You know, over the past 19 years, this legislation has evolved from an emergency response into a comprehensive national program for the care and support of Americans living with HIV/AIDS. It helps the communities that are most severely affected by this epidemic and often least served by our health care system., including minorities, the LGBT community, rural communities and the homeless. It's often the only option for the uninsured and the underinsured and provides lifesaving medical services to more than half-a-million Americans every year in every corner of the country. It's helped us to open a critical front on the ongoing battle against HIV/AIDS, but let me clear. This is a battle that's far from over, and it's a battle that all of us need to do our part to join. AIDS may no longer be the leading killer of Americans ages 25 to 44, as it once was, but there are still 1.1 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States, and more than 56,000 new infections occur every single year.
Tackling this epidemic, will take far more aggressive approaches than we've seen in the past, not only from our federal government, but also state and local governments, from local community organizations, and from places of worship. But it will also take an effort to end the stigma that has stopped people from getting tested, that has stopped people frfom facing their own illness and has sped the spread of this disease for far too long. A couple years ago Michelle and I were in Africa, and we tried to combat the stigma when we were in Kenya, by taking a public HIV/AIDS test and I'm proud to announce today, we're about to take another step towards ending that stigma.
Twenty-two years ago in a decision that was rooted in fear rather than fact the United States instituted a travel ban on entry into the country for people living with HIV/AIDS. Now we talk about reducing the stigma of this disease, yet we've treated a visitor living with it as a threat. We lead the world when it comes to helping stem the AIDS pandemic, yet we are one of only a dozen countries that still bar people from [sic] HIV from entering our own country. If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it, and that's why on Monday, my Administration will publish a final rule that eliminates the travel ban, effective just after the New Year. Congress and President Bush began this process last year and they ought to be commended for it. We are finishing the job. It's a step that will encourage people to get tested and get treatment, it's a step that will keep families together and it's a step that will save lives.
To view the video:
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons; This photo of Ryan White was taken by me (Wildhartlivie) in the spring of 1989 at a fund raising event in Indianapolis, Indiana. Author: Original uploader was Wildhartlivie at en.wikipedia
Wildhartlivie at en.wikipedia, the copyright holder of this work, has published or hereby publishes it under the following licenses: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
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