- Person
- Elizabeth Taylor
- Lived
- 1932–2011
- Field
- AIDS advocacy
- From
- British-American
The story
Elizabeth Taylor, the film star who converted to Judaism in 1959, was one of the first celebrities to take up the fight against HIV and AIDS. After helping to found amfAR in 1985 to pay for research, she turned to a second problem: many people already sick with AIDS could not afford treatment or basic care.
Taylor took her case to Washington. She testified before the Senate and the House of Representatives in 1986, 1990 and 1992, and according to amfAR her testimony was most notable in helping to secure Senate support for the Ryan White CARE Act of 1990. The law was named after Ryan White, an Indiana teenager who contracted HIV through a contaminated blood transfusion, and it was signed on 18 August 1990.
The Ryan White programme became the largest federally funded programme in the United States for people living with HIV and AIDS. At first it gave states grants to provide AZT treatment. Over time it grew to fund local and state primary medical care, support services, prescription drugs through AIDS Drug Assistance Programs, and training for health workers. It serves low income, uninsured and underinsured people as a payer of last resort, and it has been estimated to provide some level of care to around 500,000 people a year.
Taylor did not leave care to government alone. In 1991 she founded the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, known as ETAF, to provide direct services for people with HIV and AIDS, complementing amfAR's focus on research, education and advocacy. She paid the foundation's overhead costs herself, so that donations could go to the cause, and it works internationally. She also founded the Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center at the Whitman Walker Clinic in Washington, DC, and an endowment fund for the UCLA Clinical AIDS Research and Education Center.
Together these efforts helped turn sympathy into treatment. Funding that Taylor helped win in Congress still pays for medicine and medical care for hundreds of thousands of Americans with HIV every year.
Why it matters
The Ryan White programme that Taylor helped win in Congress still pays for HIV medicine and care for hundreds of thousands of low income Americans each year.
About Elizabeth Taylor
Hollywood legend and convert to Judaism who used her fame to fight AIDS when few would touch it, co-founding amfAR and her own foundation and raising hundreds of millions.
More about Elizabeth Taylor
Sources
- Dame Elizabeth Taylor amfAR
- Ryan White CARE Act Wikipedia
- Elizabeth Taylor Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.