(CNN) -- A legacy of President George W. Bush will be that he saved 10 million lives around the world.
His critics ignore it, but name another president about whom one can say that with such certainty. It is what historians will say a decade from now looking back. Not bad for a president who leaves office with the lowest approval rating in recent memory.
The bottom line is: George Bush is a healer.
First, a surprise proclamation came on January 29, 2003.
I was in the first row in the House chamber when three quarters through his State of the Union address, the president boldly said: "I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years ... to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean" and "lead the world in sparing innocent people from a plague of nature."
And lead the world we did. No president in history had made such a commitment against a single disease. Those words and the action that followed meant that instead of another 30 million people dying from HIV infections, maybe just another 20 million will.
Later that night in an interview for CNN in my Capitol office, I predicted that five years later, this commitment to fight HIV would be the single most significant thing the president said that night. It was.
But even I -- who as physician in Africa had witnessed how this virus was hollowing out societies -- did not predict the huge global impact this Bush commitment would have on generations to come.
In my annual medical mission trips to Africa during the Bush administration, I saw the cost of treatment for HIV with life-saving antiretrovirals (ARVs) drop from $4,000 a year to $125. The number of Africans on ARVs jumped from 50,000 to 2.1 million.
And the multiplier effect of Bush making this a presidential global priority was reflected thereafter in every meeting I had as Senate majority leader with the world leaders, including those from Russia, China and India. If you were dealing with the United States, you'd better have made HIV a national priority, because we had.
