The White House on Sunday released a
video featuring President Barack Obama welcoming attendees to the
19th International AIDS Conference.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and
former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are among the
politicians expected to attend the conference, which opened Sunday at
the Washington Convention Center.
This is the first time that the United
States has hosted the conference since 1990 due to a travel ban which
restricted people living with HIV from entering the country. In
2009, President Obama signed legislation which ended the 22-year ban.
White House officials announced last
week that the president would not be speaking at the conference.
“On behalf of Americans everywhere,
welcome to the 2012 International AIDS Conference and thank you for
your commitment to achieving an AIDS-free generation here in America
and around the world,” Obama says in the 3-minute video. “We've
made great progress, but there is still a lot of work to do. So,
let's move forward together.” (The video is embedded in the right
panel of this page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)
Senior Obama Administration officials –
in addition to Hillary Clinton – participating in the conference
include Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius;
U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador Eric Goosby; Director of the
White House Office of National AIDS Policy Grant Colfax; and Anthony
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, NIH.