Or not. Within the last century only the flu pandemic of 1918-19 has constituted as great and widespread a threat to human population as the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Yet threats of this magnitude have failed to mobilize an effective interventionist regime. While it is useful to speculate on some of the reasons that such a regime has not emerged (e.g. the disease emerged outside the developed world (non "us"), and then proliferated in stigmatized populations, wide spread denial of the size and extent of the disease by many governments, etc.) the combination of urgency of impact (disease incidence continues to rise) and failures in the establishment of an effective governance regime (typified by the failure of the U.S. government to contribute its full share to the global fund) shows that the HIV/AIDS pandemic has new lessons for us about how crisis dynamics do and do not work to effect appropriate responses.