If there are any lessons learned from oral PrEP failing to reach communities in the 12 years it’s been available, it’s that any future form of HIV prevention must be universally accessible to all, no matter how much money is in your pocket.
Despite cost creating major barriers to access to HIV prevention, stigma and misinformation are equal pressing challenges in reaching communities—and this is where Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. come in.
Back in early 2023, I was part of an effort urging the publishing house Simon & Schuster to end the distribution of an AIDS denialism book, which thankfully later got removed from their site. A lot of this advocacy was inspired by the anti-PrEP ads that flurried across social media platforms in 2020, sharing damaging talking points about the prevention drug. As AIDS advocates, we knew alarmist language that was stewed with misinformation could harm efforts connecting people to PrEP and deter people from trusting the science behind it.
During our Simon & Schuster campaign, I penned a piece for HIV-AIDS site TheBody named AIDS Denialism Is Still Deadly in 2023. The piece ended with this: “It’s easy to say that fringe opinions can’t attract an audience after we’ve made such immense progress and have taken revolutionary steps to preventing, treating, and curing HIV/AIDS. But who would have thought AIDS deniers would be given platforms as large as these?”
I have often revisited these two lines since election night. People like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is Trump’s top pick for the Secretary of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), seemed so distant from any material decision-making power until now. This is someone who has pushed the falsehood that HIV does not cause AIDS and even suggested that “lifestyle choices” and recreational drug use are what cause the virus. This type of AIDS denialism, accompanied by a range of health-related falsehoods and misinformation, is what’s keeping many AIDS advocates up at night.
Along with Trump’s terrifying nominee, there are also known linkages to him and Project 2025, a right-wing playbook housed by the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 has major implications for the fight against HIV including the stripping of LGBTQ+ protections and sexual and reproductive rights, and the potential gutting of Medicaid and other lifesaving programs.
This World AIDS Day we can either choose to feel demoralized when thinking about the next four years, or we can be reinvigorated to fight against any challenge to the progress we’ve made in ending the epidemic. I say let’s follow the rallying cry of veterans past and present and ACT UP, FIGHT BACK.
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