before the announcement he sent tony fauci to africa. he came back -- again, this is before the state of the union -- and basically said, mr. president, this can be done. the naysayers out there, including the leaders in africa, are wrong. it is caused by a virus. if we mobilize american industry, if we make it a public/private partnership, if we put -- at that time it was about $15 billion over five years into i can promise you based on science -- he didn't say promise -- i can pledge to you based on science that we can diminish the cost and reduce the burden on this disease and cut it in half. it came back to science. so plowed straight ahead. but remember you had recipient countries that said, america, the west, stay out of our business, it's not caused by a virus and anti-retro virals don't work. we relied on science and our industry and creativity and drove straight through it. >> i was just going to say just to complete that thought i would say it's the results. he became convinced once he saw the results and the results were happe

tony fauci, ambassador burkes among others, thank you for your continued leadership on pepfar. 15 years ago, president bush came to understand the gravity of the hiv/aids pandemic which was threatening to wipe out an entire generation on the continent of africa. he believed to whom much is given, much is required. i saw his squoet quote is on th banner over there and he decided the united states had a moral responsibility to intervene. he recognized, too, that the united states had a national security imperative to act. when we confront suffering and save lives we give hope to devastated populations, strengthen and stabilize society and make our country and the world safer. during his state of the union address in 2003 when he proposed pepfar he said, quote, seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many. as we mark the 15th anniversary of pepfar, we recognize its remarkable results, the more than 14 million lives that have been spared through anti-retro viral drugs and the more two million babies that have been born hiv-free to infected mothers. pepfar's suc

. >> if tony fauci was here, he would go into this in some detail, the idea of having to build things in eggs is so much yesterday's technology. the concrete example this past year with the flu vaccine having been surprisingly ineffective turns out the virus mutated in the process of being grown in the eggs. so therefore it turned not to be a particularly effective vaccine for something that we didn't have control over. these new platforms which allow you to build vaccines in a much more rapid fashion and much more directed fashion, dna- based vaccines, rna-based vaccines. once you have that platform going you can very quickly adapt it to many different pathogens. that's certainly something we're working on now to develop this influenza vaccine and congress has given us additional funds so we wouldn't have to have the yearly effort to try to guess right. you'd have a vaccine that works against virtually all strains and would also be effective against that next 1918 style pandemic which we were all worried about and which is overdue. >> we did include a pan flu legislation in possible