The Harvard AIDS Scandal, Cont'd.
Former
Boston Globe columnist and current blogger David Warsh
has an excellent piece adding new information to the Harvard AIDS scandal.
One of the more unattractive suggestions put out by Mass Hall to explain its glacial handling of the emergency AIDS grant was that School of Public Health epidemiologist Phyllis Kanki somehow wasn't up to the job of handling the large ($107 million) grant.
Warsh challenges that notion head-on: In the public health world, he writes, "Phyllis Kanki is a star -- a research scientist who helped identify nimbler and more virulent strains of the HIV virus in Africa; a top performer in Gates Foundation prevention initiative grant competitions; the woman who, by some accounts, "saved Senegal," devising a novel and highly successful strategy of differential interventions among different groups."
Nonetheless, Harvard delayed implementation of the emergency grant money—intended to be used for purchasing drugs desperately needed by dying AIDS patients in Nigeria—so that Larry Summers could impose control over the money and its disposition. In the meantime, hundreds of AIDS patients who might have been saved died from their disease. But Summers had control.
As Warsh writes, "Five months after the PEPFAR grant was announced, Harvard accepted it, ordering Kanki to stop complaining about its history, to cease talking about the project directly with the government itself, and to report exclusively to a new executive director, who had been hired to work for Hyman and Summers -- long-time World Bank health and education specialist Richard Skolnik."
I've written before that what's happened with this grant is a scandal far more important than the women-in-science brouhaha. It was, after all, a matter of life and death.
The press covered the women-in-science controversy endlessly. Other than the Crimson, only the
Boston Globe has run anything about the Harvard AIDS scandal. That is a harsh indictment of the media. Are you listening, New York Times?
