As part of dismantling USAID, Trump and Musk have killed funding for the PEPFAR program, originally established by George Bush, which has saved millions from AIDS for decades. They have also slashed much of the CDC’s HIV workforce, including entire branches devoted to behavioral and clinical surveillance, research, and prevention communication.
Update 4/12/25: From The Atlantic (gift article):
- If the U.S. and other countries continue to slash HIV funds, the virus could cause up to 10.8 million new infections and nearly 3 million deaths within the next five years, recent estimates suggest; as many as 500,000 of those deaths could be children’s.
- One online tracker has calculated that since the start of the funding freeze on PEPFAR—which supported more than 20 million people living with HIV, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa—more than 30,000 adults, cut off from lifesaving treatment, and 3,000 children, including those newly born to infected mothers, may have died.
- The Foundation for AIDS Research has estimated that severe cuts to the CDC’s HIV-prevention funding could lead to as many as 14,000 additional AIDS-related deaths in the U.S. by 2030.
- Some four decades into the fight against AIDS, “we were actually talking about eliminating HIV globally,” Mofenson told me. Now, though, decades’ worth of progress seem to have “just disappeared overnight.” That includes the work the public-health establishment has done to collaborate with affected communities. “It has taken us decades to be able to build the trust,” El-Sadr told me. “Now it’s like we are rolling back the years.”
From Politico: Global AIDS program teetering after Trump admin’s shock-and-awe: President Trump is taking apart one of George W. Bush’s proudest achievements.
“Since late February, the Trump administration has terminated hundreds of millions of dollars in PEPFAR grants and contracts amid its rapid effort to align foreign aid with its “America First” policy, according to a list obtained by POLITICO. PEPFAR [is] the program President George W. Bush created to combat HIV and AIDS in the developing world. Bush has long championed it and the 25 million lives it’s saved as the best example of his “compassionate conservatism.”
“PEPFAR is a strategic investment in our own national security,” Hannah Johnson, a senior program manager for global policy at the institute, wrote earlier this month, arguing that “it engenders goodwill toward the United States at a time when Russia and China are competing for greater influence, in ways that are not beneficial in the long-term for the African continent.”
The cuts the administration has made have alarmed public health advocates. A sudden end to PEPFAR could kill six million people in the next four years, reverse decades of progress and lead to growing HIV epidemics across the world, over 500 AIDS physicians and researchers warned in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.”
Letting HIV loose around the world could lead to a rapid growth in infections here in the U.S., putting our own lives at risk.
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