[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 9 (Monday, March 6, 2000)]
[Pages 434-437]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks Following a Meeting With Biotechnology, Foundation, and 
International Leaders and an Exchange With Reporters

March 2, 2000

Vaccine Research

    The President. Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, I have a very 
distinguished group of leaders here in the White House today, and I 
thank them all for coming--leaders of the international organizations 
concerned with the health of people throughout the world; Minister of 
Health from Uganda; the leaders of the pharmaceutical industry and 
biotech industry and the foundation community in our country who are 
profoundly interested in joining forces to fight against diseases that 
kill both people and progress in the world's poorest countries, diseases 
like AIDS, TB, and malaria, each of which claim over a million lives a 
year, and others as well.

    We agreed that the solution must include the development and the 
delivery of effective vaccines. That's how we got rid of smallpox and 
come close to eliminating polio. So today we're beginning a partnership 
to eradicate the leading infectious killers of our time, speeding the 
delivery of existing vaccines and getting to the heart of the problem, 
the lack of incentives for private industry to invest in new vaccines 
for people who simply can't afford to buy them.

    I have attempted to put a comprehensive package on the table so that 
the United States can do its part to change this: a billion-dollar tax 
credit to speed the invention of vaccines; a $50 million contribution to 
a global fund to purchase vaccines; substantial increase in research at 
the National Institutes of Health.

    I've asked the World Bank to dedicate more lending to improve 
health, and Mr. Wolfensohn has been very forthcoming here today, and I 
thank him for that. The private sector is also responding to this 
challenge, and I want to thank them and recognize the

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commitments that have been announced here today. Merck is committing to 
develop an AIDS vaccine not just for strains of the virus that affect 
wealthy nations but for strains that ravage the poorest nations as well. 
This is profoundly important. It's also donating a million doses of 
Hepatitis B vaccine to those who need it most. American Home Products 
will donate 10 million doses of a vaccine to--strains of pneumonia and 
meningitis in children. SmithKline Beecham will expand its malaria 
vaccine program and begin new vaccine trials in Africa and will donate 
drugs worth a billion dollars to eliminate elephantiasis, which is a 
painful and potentially very crippling and disfiguring tropical disease. 
Aventis Pharma will donate 50 million doses of polio vaccine to five 
war-torn African nations.

    This is a very important beginning. It will save lives and make it 
clear that we're serious. But all of us agree there is more to do. We 
have to first build on the bipartisan support that now exists in our 
Congress to enact the research and experimentation tax credit and the 
tax credit that we proposed for this specific purpose and to get the 
funding increases through. I will go to the G-8 meeting in Okinawa this 
summer to urge our partners to take similar steps. And so let me say, I 
am profoundly grateful.

Michigan and Pennsylvania Shootings

    Now, because this is my first opportunity to be with you when you 
can say something back today, the press, I also want to just say a word 
about the terrible shooting yesterday, which followed the killing of the 
6-year-old child the day before in Michigan.
    These two incidents were very troubling, and they have individual 
causes and explanations and doubtless will require individual responses. 
But they do remind us that there is still too much danger in this 
country and that for more than 8 months now, Congress has been sitting 
on the commonsense gun safety legislation to require child safety locks, 
to close the gun show loophole, and the background law, and to ban the 
importation of large ammunition clips.
    I have said before, I will say again today, I'm going to invite the 
leaders of this conference down to the White House to talk about what we 
can do to break the logjam. I also think we should go further. We ought 
to invest in smart gun technology. We talked about investing the 
vaccines; we're not too far from being able to develop technology which 
could change all the handguns so that they could only be fired by the 
adults who purchase them. And that would make a big difference. 
Apparently, the child who was killed was killed by another child with a 
stolen gun. If we had child trigger locks on all the guns, it wouldn't 
have happened.
    And finally, I think that it's long, long past time to license 
purchases of handguns in this country. Car owners are licensed. All 
drivers are licensed, whether they own a car or not. I think it's time 
to do that.
    So I hope that we will see some action. But the most important thing 
now, thinking about this child, is, if we had child trigger locks on all 
these guns, we could keep them alive. So I hope Congress will break the 
logjam. And I'm going to invite the conferees down here to do it.
    Let me finally say again, this is a truly astonishing turnout of 
people around this table, and together, if we work on it over the next 
few years, we can literally save the lives of millions of people. And it 
couldn't be done without the presence of all these people. And I'm very 
grateful to them. Thank you.
    Thank you very much.

Gun Control Legislation

    Q. Mr. President, if legislation was sent to you that included the 
riddance of ammunition clips and included safety locks but did not 
include the gun show loophole, would you veto that?
    The President. Well, I don't know. I think they'd have a very hard 
time explaining why they did it. Let me remind you, when I signed the 
Brady bill, and the NRA opposed it, they said, ``Oh, this Brady bill 
won't do any good now because criminals don't buy their guns through gun 
shops. They buy their guns at gun shows and these urban flea markets or 
on the sly, one on one. They don't use gun shops.'' Well, come to find 
out, 500,000 people couldn't get a handgun because they were felons, 
fugitives, or stalkers. And it's a safer country because of it.

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    Now that we want to extend the background check to the gun shows, 
they say the people--they say the criminals don't use the gun shows, 
even though 5 years ago they said they did. There is no logical reason 
to let these gun shows off the hook on the background checks. And the 
technology is there to do it without causing a total breakdown. And I 
suggested, if they're worried about the inconvenience to the buyers and 
the sellers, they could always--and they have these things out in the 
country somewhere--they could always deposit the weapon with the local 
sheriff's department while they're waiting to do the background check.
    There are all kinds of fixes for the alleged problems here, and 
there's no reason to do the--the Brady bill is saving people's lives and 
keeping guns out of the wrong hands. But we do need the child trigger 
locks. That child would be alive today if that gun had had a child 
trigger lock on it that the other 6-year-old child could not have fired. 
And we just need to--we've got to have it. We've got to have it.
    The accidental death rate of children by guns in this country is 9 
times higher than the rate of the next 25 biggest industrial economies 
combined. I mean, that's something that--if you forget about the 
intentional crime, just look at the accidents, we've got to do it, and 
we need to do it tomorrow. We need to do it as quickly as we can.

International Monetary Fund

    Q. Mr. President, what are your specific objections to the German 
IMF candidate, and what do you expect to happen from here?
    The President. We've handled that in the appropriate way, I think, 
through Secretary Summers. Let me say, I want there to be a European 
Director of the IMF. I will not support an American candidate, even 
though I have enormous respect for Mr. Fischer. And I'm gratified that 
the African nations expressed their support for him. He's an enormously 
able man. But we have a naturalized American over there leading the 
World Bank in a great way, and I think the Europeans should lead the 
IMF. And it would suit me if a German led the IMF.
    I don't--nobody is playing any games here. We went through a 
terrible crisis in the late nineties in Asia. We in the United States 
went through a terrible problem with our friends in Mexico when their 
economy was on the verge of collapse and causing others in Latin America 
and, indeed, far beyond Latin America to teeter. We think the IMF will 
become even more important in the years ahead.
    We want the strongest possible person in the world to head it. It's 
a big, big, important job. But I am completely committed to having a 
European head of the IMF. And it would suit me if the person were from 
Germany. I'd like to see Germany play a bigger role in all these 
international institutions.

Religious Right

    Q. Mr. President, how do you feel about Senator McCain's remarks 
about the leaders of the religious right? Would you care to associate 
yourself with his description of what's wrong?
    The President. Well, they've been a lot rougher on me than they have 
on him. [Laughter] I thought it was rather interesting that he was--you 
know, they weren't for him, and I understand that.
    Look, let me say what I think is the--I think that people of faith 
who believe that their faith drives them to certain political positions 
should be able to pursue that, their political views, whatever they are, 
in American politics. I just don't believe they ought to say that people 
who disagree with them are somehow unworthy of receiving the same 
consideration they expect to receive in the political arena.
    And so I don't want to--I think that for the last 20 years, we've 
all been too focused on harsh rhetoric and the politics of personal 
destruction, and I don't want to contribute to it today. But I've been 
the recipient of some of their venom, and I don't want to respond in 
kind. What I want to make is I think most people who take positions in 
politics take them not because they're the prisoners of interest groups 
but because that's what they believe. And there are plenty of 
differences that ought to be debated, and then the voters should make 
their judgments.

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    And I think any attempt to demonize or, in effect, perform the first 
plastic surgery on these candidates and to treat them like they're not 
even people, is wrong, whoever does that. So I don't want to contribute 
to that. I welcome the members of the religious right into the American 
political community, and I welcome their right to vote against me at 
every election. [Laughter] I do. It's part of what makes America a great 
country. I just don't think they should be condemning of other people, 
particularly in ways that may not be true, and certainly in ways that 
are almost cruel.
    I think what we need to do is to tone down the personal destruction 
and turn up the focus on the big challenges facing the country, and 
we'll all be better off. They ought to be into politics, but we ought to 
just tone it down a little bit.

Funding for Kosovo

    Q. Mr. President, last night Senators were here meeting with your 
Joint Chiefs of Staff, where they were asked for another $2.6 billion in 
supplemental aid to Kosovo. One of the main concerns these Senators had 
was whether or not the allies were pulling their fair share. Do you 
believe that the allies are contributing equal portions that the U.S. is 
putting into this?
    The President. The EU, the European allies, will pay the big 
majority of the continued costs of maintaining order and building the 
infrastructure and the future of Kosovo. We are being asked to pay a 
minority of the money that I think is more or less in line with our fair 
share and in line with the fact that we paid the majority of the costs 
for conducting the military campaign that brought the Kosovars home.
    But I know it's difficult for Congress to come up with this money, 
and they'd rather spend it someplace else. But just like we're talking 
about this vaccine issue and how, if we spend money here, it's good for 
Americans as well as for the people around the world.
    It would be a good thing if we can prove that we can end ethnic 
cleansing and slaughter in the Balkans, and nobody else has to be drug 
back there to fight in another war, or we don't have to figure out how 
to handle and take care of a million refugees who will have their health 
problems and their other problems. And so, as expensive as this is, as 
General Shelton always says, the cheapest peace--the most expensive 
peace is cheaper than the cheapest war.
    And so I hope the Congress will go along here. But it is a minority 
share, and it should be. The Europeans are shouldering the lion's share 
of the burden.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 12:55 p.m. in the Cabinet Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Minister of Health Crispus W.C.B. 
Kiyonga of Uganda; James D. Wolfensohn, president, World Bank Group; 
Kayla Rolland, who was shot and mortally wounded by a 6-year-old 
classmate in Mount Morris Township, MI; and Stanley Fischer, first 
deputy managing director and acting managing director, International 
Monetary Fund, who was nominated for the position of managing director 
of the IMF. A reporter referred to State Secretary for International 
Finance Caio Koch-Weser of Germany, who was also nominated for the 
position of managing director of the IMF. A tape was not available for 
verification of the content of these remarks.