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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/10/health/10IMMU.html

U.S. Official Is Jeered at AIDS Conference

By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

ARCELONA, Spain, July 9 — Jeering protesters today drowned out Tommy G. Thompson, the United States secretary of health and human services, as he addressed the 14th International AIDS Conference here about the Bush administration's global prevention program.

It was a revival of militancy over issues relating to AIDS seldom seen in the past decade.

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As Mr. Thompson, the chief of the American delegation here, began his speech this afternoon, about three dozen demonstrators from the audience — mainly Americans from Act Up, a protest group — marched onto the stage, blowing whistles and shouting through bullhorns, "Shame! Shame!" Mr. Thompson stopped talking until they retreated.

Surrounded by security agents, he resumed speaking. But the protesters began jeering again, calling on the United States to support protected sex and needle-exchange programs, to spend more for AIDS drugs and to give billions more each year to a global fund to fight AIDS.

The shouting kept the audience of 17,000 from hearing Mr. Thompson. His prepared text said the United States had doubled financing, to $500 million over the next 18 months, for programs "to prevent the transmission of H.I.V. from mothers to infants and to improve the health care delivery systems in 12 African nations and the Caribbean."

"No administration in any nation has ever made fighting H.I.V.-AIDS as high a priority as the United States under this administration," Mr. Thompson said.

It was a day of protests seldom seen since the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when advocates for AIDS patients chained themselves to doors of drug companies, squirted red liquid at scientists and heckled political leaders. A similar demonstration in 1990 prevented participants at the International AIDS Conference in San Francisco from hearing Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, who was secretary of health and human services in the last Bush administration. Dr. Sullivan was near the front of the room for Mr. Thompson's speech.

At this conference, international AIDS leaders like Dr. Peter Piot, an assistant director general of the United Nations and chief of its AIDS program, have been urging the public to demand greater accountability from their governments in battling the epidemic. On Sunday, Dr. Ronald O. Valdiserri, a senior AIDS official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called on Americans "to revive the passion with which the U.S. once faced the H.I.V. epidemic."

But today Dr. Piot was among the leaders who assailed the protesters for not allowing the audience to hear Mr. Thompson.

Dr. Piot, who was a political activist in his youth, said in an interview that he supported the concept of protests, "but only after someone has had a chance to speak, and there's no way one can judge what Mr. Thompson wanted to say."

A spokesman for the protesters, Gregg Gonsalves of the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York, a social service group, said they represented 12 groups in the United States.

The protesting focused on Mr. Thompson's statement here on Sunday that the Bush administration was committed to reducing the incidence of H.I.V. among American youth by 50 percent by 2010; to redressing racial and ethnic disparities fueling the epidemic in the United States, and to supporting domestic and international programs to reverse the epidemic.

Protesters called those promises hollow, saying in a news release that the administration was "attacking science-based prevention programs that talk frankly about sex and supporting abstinence-only prevention programs."

Mr. Thompson criticized the protesters as "closed-minded." In a telephone interview from his car as he left the conference center, he said he was "sorry that the militants had to rush the stage instead of listening, but that is their prerogative."

Later, Mr. Thompson talked with 10 protesters for about half an hour in a meeting that had been arranged before their demonstrations, said his spokesman, Tony Jewell.

At a news conference shortly after the demonstrations, a leading American economist, Dr. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, called the protests "a reflection of the utter confusion" within the administration about AIDS-related programs.

He said he had gone to the White House several times recently to discuss AIDS with senior staff members, though not with the president. "When I asked for numbers on the costs," he said in an interview later, "I found tremendous confusion, and it results from an absence of a plan."

Dr. Piot, Dr. Sachs and other experts said they expected to present an AIDS plan by October, in time for a board meeting of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis, an organization set up at the urging of Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general.

The White House has budgeted $988 million for worldwide anti-AIDS efforts this year, including $200 million for the global fund. But with Mr. Annan saying the fund needs $10 billion a year, advocates, including American lawmakers, say the United States' fair share is much greater.

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