Sarah Hirshander
speaker
283 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Sarah Hirshander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think we should start in 2003.
And the reason why I think we should start there is that that's when the U.S.
got involved in this so-called fight against HIV.
2003 was when HIV was surging across sub-Saharan Africa.
If you look at a chart of like infections and deaths from AIDS at the time, it is like at the top right in this moment.
Millions of people were dying each year.
Southern Africa now has the fastest rate of AIDS growth in the world.
It was also just a few months before the US invaded Iraq.
We had George W. Bush, famously a Republican, in office.
He's giving a State of the Union in January, and to the surprise of pretty much everyone, he decides to allot $15 billion of US funding to this global fight against HIV.
He was working with a bunch of medical experts behind the scenes, including someone people might recognize, Anthony Fauci.
And that was when the U.S.
really like put its foot in the door and it ended up being a huge success.
If you think about that chart I mentioned earlier, we're at the top of infections right now.
It goes down after 2003.
And PEPFAR, which is what the program ended up being called, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which describes anything that the U.S.
is giving to this sort of fight against HIV, just expanded, became better as time went on.
Sure, there were problems over time, but every presidential administration after Bush, after 2003, continued to provide funding through this program.
Yeah, this is the crazy thing.
Like, it might have been the best thing that a U.S.
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