UNIVERSITY COALITIONS for GLOBAL HEALTH

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Photo of blog author and UCGH fellow, Stephanie DeVita-Gutendorf. Stephanie DeVita-Gutendorf is the 2007-2008 global health outreach fellow of the University Coalitions for Global Health.

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PEPFAR Congressional mark up postponed!

February 8th, 2008 | Post a Comment

Here’s a PEPFAR update from one of our UCGH partners over at HealthGAP. All of our UCGH groups and students from across the country have been working hard this week to support PEPFAR so please keep up the good work!
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Hi everyone-

We’ve had amazing success in the past week. Hundreds of calls went to the offices of the Democratic members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and guess what- they worked! Nearly every member committed to attending the hearing on reauthorization of the amazing PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) bill drafted by Congressman Lantos.

Unfortunately, due to the devastating tornadoes in Tennessee and Arkansas last night, one of our major supporters, Congressman Tanner of TN, had to return to his district. Because of this, Democratic staff is not sure there will be enough votes to pass the bill out of committee, so they have postponed the voting until next Thursday at 9:30am.

So we have another week, and another challenge. Over the next seven days, we are hoping to generate even more calls to Republican House Foreign Affairs Committee members. PEPFAR has always been a bipartisan initiative, which means we need support from both sides of the aisle. We need to try and get as many Republicans to support the bill as possible!

Do you have (another) half hour to spare to help pass this critical bill? If you do, email Kaytee Riek at kaytee@healthgap.org to receive a custom-made list of Republican Foreign Affairs Committee members that need to hear from you. You’ll also get a sample script. We need to generate as many calls as possible to Congress in the next seven days. Can you help out?

Thank you for all the work you’ve done! We’ve come a long way already, and with your help, we will get this bill through committee.

-Kaytee

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under Events, HIV/AIDS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.