During Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Trump is expected to announce a plan to end the spread of HIV by 2030.
POLITICO reported that four individuals “with knowledge of the planned remarks” said that Trump plans to address the HIV epidemic, though the speech is still not finalized.
“Under Trump’s HIV strategy, health officials would spend the first five years focusing on communities across roughly 20 states where the most HIV infections occur,” POLITICO reports. “The ultimate goal is to stop new infections over a 10-year period, said two officials, with some parallels to how the Trump administration is targeting the opioid epidemic.”
One of the biggest influencers of Trump’s decision is reportedly AIDS researcher Robert Redfield, who became the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in March of last year.
Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex M. Azar II said in a recent speech that the goal is to prevent the spread of infection through treatment.
“People living with H.I.V. who take medicine every day as prescribed, keeping an undetectable viral load, have effectively no risk of sexually transmitting H.I.V. to their H.I.V.-negative partners,” Mr. Azar said in a recent speech, The New York Times reports.
Carl E. Schmid II, the deputy executive director of the AIDS institute, reportedly welcomed the plan and called it “very bold,” and said it “could be one of his [Trump’s] greatest achievements.”
The Human Rights Campaign responded to Trump’s planned announcement, claiming that the Trump administration cannot achieve this goal with current policies and has an “ongoing record of undermining HIV and AIDS prevention, treatment, and awareness.”
“If this administration wants to combat the spread of HIV, they need to immediately end their efforts to cut Medicaid funding, undermine the Affordable Care Act and license discrimination against the most at-risk communities when they seek healthcare,” HRC Director of Government Affairs said. “This administration simply cannot achieve this goal while, at the same time, charging forward with attacks on healthcare for the communities most impacted by HIV. The American public deserves a real commitment from their government to end the HIV epidemic.”
In December 2017, the Trump administration fired the remaining unpaid members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, months after half a dozen members resigned over disagreements with the administration’s health policies, The Washington Post reports.
One of the members who quit, Scott Schoettes, wrote in a column that “The Trump Administration has no strategy to address the on-going HIV/AIDS epidemic, seeks zero input from experts to formulate HIV policy, and — most concerning — pushes for legislation that will harm people living with HIV and halt or reverse important gains made in the fight against the disease.”
Co-director of policy and strategic projects at Transgender Law Center, Cecilia Chung, also sat on the council and said she is skeptical of the plan.
“I’m afraid that the promise will be in vain,” Chung told The Washington Post.
At the end of 2015, the CDC estimated that 1.1 million people above the age of 13 in the United States are infected with HIV including 162,500 people who are undiagnosed.