Pharmaceutical companies still had patent protection over their products and were unwilling to negotiate these patents to allow affordable drugs to be produced.
The Pharmaceutical companies were clearly the villains, willing to let millions of people die instead of allowing affordable versions of their medicines to be produced.
While we are talking about US Presidents, one other President must be mentioned. The Clinton Health Access Initiatives under the Clinton Foundation has played an incredibly important role in the global HIV epidemic. One of their major accomplishments was to negotiate the prices of HIV drugs to a level that made them affordable for low-income countries.
Without these interventions, many countries would have difficulty in treating patients with HIV disease. The Clinton Health Access Initiative works tirelessly to expand treatment and improve care for people in Resource-limited settings.
Over the decades, HIV drugs have gotten better and better. They have gotten stronger, safer and easier to take. Unfortunately, the drugs that became available early on through programs like