If there are any classes realized from oral PrEP failing to succeed in communities within the 12 years it’s been accessible, it’s that any future type of HIV prevention have to be universally accessible to all, irrespective of how a lot cash is in your pocket.
Regardless of value creating main limitations to entry to HIV prevention, stigma and misinformation are equal urgent challenges in reaching communities—and that is the place Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are available in.
Again in early 2023, I used to be a part of an effort urging the publishing home Simon & Schuster to finish the distribution of an AIDS denialism ebook, which fortunately later acquired faraway from their web site. A whole lot of this advocacy was impressed by the anti-PrEP advertisements that flurried throughout social media platforms in 2020, sharing damaging speaking factors concerning the prevention drug. As AIDS advocates, we knew alarmist language that was stewed with misinformation may hurt efforts connecting individuals to PrEP and deter individuals from trusting the science behind it.
Throughout our Simon & Schuster marketing campaign, I penned a bit for HIV-AIDS web site TheBody named AIDS Denialism Is Still Deadly in 2023. The piece ended with this: “It’s straightforward to say that fringe opinions can’t entice an viewers after we’ve made such immense progress and have taken revolutionary steps to stopping, treating, and curing HIV/AIDS. However who would have thought AIDS deniers could be given platforms as giant as these?”
I’ve usually revisited these two traces since election evening. Folks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s Trump’s prime choose for the Secretary of Division of Well being and Human Providers (HHS), appeared so distant from any materials decision-making energy till now. That is somebody who has pushed the falsehood that HIV does not cause AIDS and even prompt that “life-style selections” and leisure drug use are what trigger the virus. This sort of AIDS denialism, accompanied by a variety of health-related falsehoods and misinformation, is what’s conserving many AIDS advocates up at evening.
Together with Trump’s terrifying nominee, there are additionally identified linkages to him and Undertaking 2025, a right-wing playbook housed by the Heritage Basis. Undertaking 2025 has main implications for the combat in opposition to HIV together with the stripping of LGBTQ+ protections and sexual and reproductive rights, and the potential gutting of Medicaid and different lifesaving applications.
This World AIDS Day we are able to both select to really feel demoralized when excited about the following 4 years, or we will be reinvigorated to combat in opposition to any problem to the progress we’ve made in ending the epidemic. I say let’s comply with the rallying cry of veterans previous and current and ACT UP, FIGHT BACK.
