With clear-eyed patience and seriousness, The Age of AIDS shows that while HIV needed no help in

replicating itself inside humans ((NARBS Meter 10!! HIV replication in the human body is swiftly
reduced to zero by the immune system, which replaces virtually all HIV by antibodies within weeks)),
its most helpful friends were traits already well-lodged in humans: ignorance, apathy, fear and
prejudice. Watching with 2006 hindsight, those initial emotionally fraught skirmishes in the early
’80s between well-meaning health experts in San Francisco and liberated gay men who wanted
their bathhouses kept open seem historically quaint compared to today’s more dispiriting
conflicts between moralizing forces and commonsense warriors. Take the anti-condom, pro-
abstinence movement that has characterized President Bush’s grand-gesture money
disbursement and often-sidelined prevention programs that were working in parts of the world that
have seen the most dramatic rising numbers of new HIV cases. As former amFAR (Foundation for
AIDS Research) president Merv Silverman says in the film, “Without question, politics has been
one of the driving forces behind the spread of this disease.” ((NARBS Meter 0! – This statement is
entirely true!))

The herky-jerky, valiant, then flawed efforts to counter AIDS and stop it from spreading since the
first cases emerged 25 years ago are less a case of one step forward and two steps back, but rather a
few steps forward and then — to note the number of new cases every year — five million steps
back. A discouraging snarl of politics and morality, capitalism and Third World geography has
stymied the global fight. ((NARBS Meter 6! Nothing has stymied the global fight against HIV?AIDS
more than the fact that it is entirely without valid support in the scientific literature. Nothing stymies
a fight against a disease more effectively that not being aware of its true nature, in this case as fact
rewritten as fiction.))

On the medical front, the documentary revisits the way scientists struggled to pinpoint the
disease’s source, which ultimately led to the Congo and the determination that the 70 million
that have been infected so far can be traced to one transmission between chimpanzee and man.
((NARBS Meter 10!! – No one has in fact been infected by HIV except by their mothers, or possibly
through a needle or gay sex, so the idea that a chimp first infected a human is no more than a
tribute to the enduring silliness of the human race, as embodied by Robert Gallo and the people who
believe his theorizing)). Then there’s the race for a cure, which brought early hope that AZT and
the eventual drug combos — the triple cocktail — would extend the lives of those with HIV. Says
on-camera interviewee William Dodge, an early patient in the cocktail trials with an almost touching
sense of his place in history, “There was the world of HIV prior to me, and the world of HIV from
my time forward.” Part of that new world, though, was a whole new fight with pharmaceutical
companies over the affordability of such vital treatment. ((NARBS Meter 8!! There is no evidence
that any decline in HIV?AIDS fatalities was the result of the drug cocktail approach))

One of the strongest arguments the film makes is how much good can be done when all elements of
a country’s infrastructure align to better people’s lives, when social desire and political desire
see eye to eye and a financial commitment emerges, and likewise, what damage indifference and
neglect can do. While close-mindedness was hampering an effective response from U.S. leaders, for
example, Uganda took a bold, direct approach; its president, Yoweri Museveni, preached tolerance,
easing fears about transmission, and distributed condoms. In Brazil, the government passed a law
guaranteeing retroviral treatment for AIDS to all its citizens. It took Ronald Reagan seven years,
meanwhile, just to mention AIDS for the first time in public. And, as the film explains, his first speech
on the topic — at an amFAR event in 1987 — segued weirdly and discouragingly from a plea for
understanding to a push for intolerance when he cited the disease as a reason to keep foreigners out
of the country.

And if one needed any proof that before the WMD fiasco other administrations believed experts got
in the way of policy, there’s a damning interview with speechwriter Landon Parvin, who says that
when he started working with Reagan on his amFAR remarks, he realized that Reagan and Surgeon
General C. Everett Koop had never had a single conversation about AIDS. Plus, Parvin was asked by
an Oval Office staffer to remove a mention that one couldn’t get the disease from mosquitoes.
Says Parvin, “It didn’t make much sense to have White House staff second-guessing a medical
doctor, but it happened.”((NASBS Meter 5 – Little does Mr. Parvin know, but in fact second-guessing
scientists, let alone medical doctors, may be the only way to prevent the “pandemic” of HIV?AIDS
from infecting every man, woman and child on the planet, given the historical rate of expansion of
labelling other ailments as HIV?AIDS))

Bill Clinton naturally comes off better — more knowledgeable and compassionate in his interview
for the documentary — but the filmmakers don’t let him off the hook either, citing his refusal to
back needle-exchange programs, a proven quasher of new HIV cases. “The country wasn’t
ready for it,” Clinton says. ((NARBS Meter 3 – As a Rhodes scholar and a seasoned politician of
consummate skills, Bill Clinton has little excuse for not being fully briefed on the politics and science
of HIV?AIDS, other than the cynical fact that the truth is irrelevant to his role on the political stage))

Arguably the saddest story of miseducation, though, is South Africa’s, where President Thabo
Mbeke, under the sway of denialist scientists like UC Berkeley’s Peter Duesberg, questioned
publicly whether HIV causes AIDS, leading to irreparable damage to the country’s efforts to get
drug treatment to citizens. He banned AZT and triple cocktails, calling them “too toxic.” Perhaps
the most wretched irony of all is that Mbeke was handpicked by Nelson Mandela, and Mandela’s
son would eventually die of AIDS.((NARBS Meter 10! – There really is no excuse for series producer
Renata Simone setting aside her knowledge of the existence of this high level scientific dispute. We
happen to know that she was told about it at a lunch with a reliable independent informant fifteen
years ago; he remembers a “sweet little girl” who wielded “the tremendous power” of being
responsible for all the AIDS coverage at WGBH Boston, who told him plainly that if she covered the
dissent she would lose all her access to the NIH and her official sources. After a decade and a half
she is still ignoring not only the obvious permanent strength of the scientific objections but also the
respectability and credibility of the objectors.))
Obviously this isn’t the most upbeat of topics, even though the on-camera talking heads present
a wide spectrum of thoughtful, intelligent and inspiring leaders, from progressive scientists like
David Ho ((NASBS Meter 8! Ho won a Time cover with his Ptolemaic theory of how the scientifically
innocent HIV could reverse what was evidently the normal operation of the immune system as
indicated by the perfectly conventional signs of success in defeating an antigen, but his tortuous
mathematical calculations have been exploded since in the mainstream literature)) to grass-roots
activists like Noerine Kaleeba, who founded Africa’s first AIDS support organization, to UNAIDS
executive director Peter Piot, and even a glamour humanitarian like Bono ((NARBS Meter 6! – It is
time for glamourous humanitarians to doublecheck their sources if they are to pressure world
leaders on their priorities)). But Simone and her writer/director colleagues William Cran and Greg
Barker know better than to equate celebrity charm with cheap positivism. ((NARBS Meter 7!
Actually, Cran and Barker should know better than to equate nonsensical nonscience with a serious
policy goal and join in peddling it as worthier of more funding than cancer and heart disease which
kill as many as thirty times more people in this country than HIV?AIDS.)) And in the end, even after
four hours of viewing, I found myself unable to forget a description in the first minutes of Part I from
UCSF professor of clinical medicine Molly Cooke, who said of those early casualties at San Francisco
General Hospital: “Patients would die of their own dementia the way 80-year-olds do — curl up
in bed and die. And these were young men.”((NARBS Meter 6! These redoubtable Frontline
employees an their compliant reviewer haven’t noticed that the symptoms of HIV?AIDS have
changed over the years in the US, and from the US to a totally different list of symptoms overseas?
Alas, expecting film makers even at Frontline to give up pressing emotional buttons in favor of
investigating or even scratching the surface of the inconsistencies of the picture they are presenting
seems hopeless indeed.))

After a quarter century of political denial and social stigma, of stunning scientific breakthroughs,
bitter policy battles and inadequate prevention campaigns, HIV/AIDS continues to spread rapidly
throughout much of the world, particularly in developing nations. To date, some 30 million people
worldwide have already died of AIDS.

"It's a very human virus, a very human epidemic. It touches right to the heart of our existence," says
Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS. "When you think of it, that in let's say 25 years, about
70 million people have become infected with this virus, probably coming from one [transmission]...
it's mind blowing."

And the crisis continues: Over the next decade, an estimated 40 million more people will contract
HIV. "We cannot continue just to treat patients as they become infected," says Dr. David Ho, AIDS
researcher and Time magazine's 1996 "Man of the Year" for his work on the life-prolonging "triple
cocktail" treatment. "The real solution to this epidemic is to curtail the spread of the virus."
Why humanity has failed to stop the spread of HIV is the central question of "The Age of AIDS." Over
four hours, the series examines one of the most important scientific and political stories of our time:
the story of a mysterious agent that invaded the human species and exploited its frailties and
compulsions -- sexual desire and drug addiction, bigotry and greed, political indifference and
bureaucratic inertia -- to spread itself across the globe.

Filmed around the world in 19 countries, The Age of AIDS features interviews with major players in
the battle against HIV/AIDS: scientists, including Dr. Jim Curran of Emory University and formerly
with the Centers for Disease Control, and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute for Allergic and
Infectious Diseases; political figures, including former President Bill Clinton, U2 front man and AIDS
activist Bono and evangelist Franklin Graham; and innovative activists, including Cleve Jones, creator
of the AIDS Quilt; Noerine Kaleeba, founder of Africa's first AIDS support organization; and Mechai
Viravaidya, "the condom king" of Thailand.

The film documents the frantic search by American and European scientists and epidemiologists to
find the source of the deadly infection as they tracked its spread among gay men, intravenous drug
users, and hemophiliacs, and then into the general population. The trail led them back in time, from
major American and European cities to Haiti and finally to the Congo.

"It has become incontrovertible," says virologist Dr. George Shaw, "that the HIV-1 virus that
currently infects over 60 million humans arose as a consequence of a single transmission event from
a single chimpanzee in West Central Africa to one human."

The story then moves from the mysterious virus to the fear, stigma and political controversies during
the Reagan administration. Attempts to prevent the spread of the disease, most prevalent among
gay men and intravenous drug users at the time, sparked furious public debate. As the film tracks
HIV's devastating spread around the world, it documents how some countries-in Europe, Africa and
Asia-found tools to slow its progress, including needle-exchange programs and massive condom
distribution campaigns.

"Without question, politics has been one of the driving forces in the spread of this disease," says Dr.
Merv Silverman, former president of the American Foundation for AIDS Research. "AIDS is the most
political disease I've ever seen."

The second night of "The Age of AIDS" begins by exploring the chasm that emerged between rich
and poor following the development of the miraculous "triple cocktail" HIV treatment. In the mid-
1990s, when doctors discovered the cocktail, it seemed to signal a new era in which AIDS was no
longer a fatal disease. But the high price of the drugs meant they were unaffordable to patients in
developing nations. "The Age of AIDS" tracks the political struggle to lower those prices, in countries
like Brazil, and documents the South African government's tragic failure to battle the epidemic that
was overwhelming its country.

"This is a movement and a government that fought for the equality of black people," says South
African activist Zachie Achmat. "To find out that the movement does not care about the lives of poor
people and the lives of black people and is prepared to consign us to the graveyard was actually
quite shocking."

The film also examines the next wave of the AIDS epidemic in some of the most populous and
strategically important nations in the world, including Russia, India and China, and tracks the same
pattern of official denial and political indifference that characterized the epidemic in so many other
countries. Globally, pressure was building around the political struggle to finance AIDS prevention
and treatment in the developing world, between the UN-backed Global Fund and the Bush
administration's AIDS initiative, which was heavily influenced by the president's evangelical Christian
political supporters.

Twenty-five years after the first cases were diagnosed, a scientific solution to the AIDS pandemic
remains elusive. Despite billions of dollars being poured into research, most scientists believe a
breakthrough on an effective vaccine against HIV is years, perhaps decades away. "Even if we come
up with a cure or vaccine tomorrow, just think about the time that would be needed to implement
all these measures widely throughout the world," says Dr. Ho, who was a young medical resident in
Los Angeles in 1981 when he saw his first AIDS patient. "So to me it's clear that I'm not going to see
the end of this epidemic. And it's also pretty clear that my children won't see the end of this
epidemic."

Part one follows the trail of a medical mystery which began in 1981 when five gay men in Los
Angeles were diagnosed with a deadly new disease. Traces the international response in the first
years of the epidemic, contrasting moments of inspirational leadership with the tragedy of missed
opportunities. Reveals the astounding spread of the infection to over 70 million infections in 2006.
Part two explores the chasm that emerged between rich and poor following the development of the
miraculous "triple cocktail" HIV treatment. While the discovery seemed to signal a new era in which
AIDS was no longer a fatal disease, the high price of the drugs meant they were unaffordable to
patients in developing nations. Also examines the next wave of the AIDS epidemic in some of the
most populous and strategically important nations in the world, including Russia, India and China,
and tracks the same pattern of official denial and political indifference that characterized the
epidemic in so many other countries.