Student AIDS activists march in Burlington

BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) - AIDS activists and other supporters marched Friday to get the attention of Vermont’s U.S. senators.

Members of the Student Global AIDS Campaign at St. Michael’s College started outside Senator Leahy’s Burlington office on Main Street and marched to Senator Sanders’ office on Church Street.

They want the lawmakers to support spending $5 billion for AIDS-related programming, especially in South Africa.

“What we want is to fund this hub that we’ll be able to train doctors in these countries to make these vaccines, and so that it will actually end up helping the United States because we don’t have to do as much work on bottlenecking the vaccines from our own country,” said the group’s Adrian Harwood.

Thursday was World AIDS Day but the group marched Friday because that’s when a representative from Sanders’ office was able to meet.