The Harvard AIDS Scandal: Harvard's Response
In the January issue of Boston Magazine, Harvard "Senior Communications Officer for University Science" B.D. Colen responds to that magazine's recent article about the Harvard AIDS scandal. Because the letters section of the magazine isn't online—Boston Magazine, if you're reading this, you have a less-than-helpful website—I'll reproduce it here.
In multiple conversations and about 4, 000 words of written responses to e-mailed questions, we described to reporter John Wolfson the history and current accomplishments of Harvard's African AIDS relief program. But very little of this information made it into his anonymously sourced article....To set the record straight: Before providing care to HIV-AIDS patients in three African countries, Harvard felt it important to create an infrastructure to ensure the success of this vitally important $115 million effort. Harvard appointed a program executive director with health experience in the developing world so that the scientists and clinicians could concentrate on the science while the administrator secures drug supply chains, hires staff, and handles the details that can, and do, quickly bog down such programs. As a result, tens of thousands of people have been tested for HIV, and those found positive have been provided with care for AIDS-related illnesses until they become eligible to receive antiretroviral therapy. By the end of October, 3, 195 people in Botswana, about 10, 0000 people in Nigeria, and 3, 275 people in Tanzania were receiving AIDS drugs in the Harvard program. More than 3, 2000 healthcare providers have been trained, laboratories have been strengthened, and new labs established. Systems for monitoring care and treatment have been establishedin Nigeria and Tanzania, and Harvard is assisting Botswana in developing such a system.
These steps help explain why the project was able to do so much for so many people so quickly and effectively.
A couple of thoughts.
First, Harvard has played so fast and loose with its numbers in recent years that it's hard to take these on face value, and I wouldn't.
Second, what does it say about Harvard that the only person willing to publicly defend its actions is a P.R. flack? We take the ubiquitousness of "public relations" at universities for granted now. But Harvard stands for truth, right? That's what it says on the crest. If Mass Hall really believes in what it did, shouldn't either Larry Summers or Provost Steve Hyman rise to the defense of their handling of this AIDS money? Or is it more important that they cover their asses by disassociating themselves from the whole affair?
In any event, there are a couple of logical issues with Colen's letter.
His main point is that, in order to keep the program from getting "bogged" down and losing time, Harvard took a long time—Colen conventiently declines to mention how long—to create an "infrastructure." Which is to say that, in order to save time, Harvard took time—from six months to a year, depending on whom you believe. Time that the other recipients of the "emergency" federal AIDS money didn't seem to require, something Colen also neglects to mention.
Second, Colen follows the fact of the program administrator with heaps of statistics, as if the cause and effect relationship is obvious and inevitable. But Colen doesn't establish that all those statistics could not have been achieved without the long delay—which surely led to unnecessary deaths and unnecessary further spread of HIV.
John Wolfson's original article hasn't prompted the level of outrage that, in my opinion, it should have. (A federal inquiry into Harvard's administration of the grant doesn't seem unreasonable.) Nonetheless, I still think that the tragic delay in administering emergency care to African AIDS patients—a delay brought on by Larry Summers' desire to control the grant and curtail the independence of the Harvard School of Public Health—is the darkest blot on Larry Summers' presidency.
Perhaps if those Africans happened to be white and living in Cambridge, people would care more about the long months they spent waiting for medicine that never came.
