White House marks World AIDS Day with updated national HIV strategy
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On Wednesday, the White House marked World AIDS Day 2021 by releasing an updated national strategy to bolster the fight against HIV.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has added to the challenges our heroic health care and frontline workers face, yet they continue to deliver essential HIV prevention services and provide vital care and treatment to people living with HIV,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.
“The pandemic has also interrupted HIV research and highlighted the work that still remains to achieve equitable access to HIV prevention, care, and treatment in every community — particularly for communities of color, adolescent girls and young women, and the LGBTQI+ community,” Biden said.
In 2019, the U.S. announced a federal effort to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030. The goals outlined in the Biden administration’s newly announced strategy, which covers the years 2022 to 2025, include preventing new HIV infections using treatment as prevention; pushing pre- and post-exposure prophylaxis and engaging more people with HIV in care; improving the HIV-related health outcomes of people with HIV by linking them to care immediately following diagnosis; reducing HIV-related disparities and health inequities; and achieving integrated, coordinated efforts that address the HIV epidemic among all partners through increased coordination and private-public-community partnerships.
The strategy also identifies priority populations disproportionately impacted by HIV, including Black and transgender women, people aged 13 to 24 years, people who inject drugs and Black, Latino and American Indian/Alaska Native men who have sex with men.
According to a senior administration official, this new strategy “really does seek to reenergize a whole-of-society response to the epidemic and accelerate the efforts while supporting people with HIV and reducing HIV morbidity and mortality.”
HIV Medicine Association Chair Marwan Haddad, MD, MPH, said the plan “will provide an important road map for ending HIV as an epidemic in the United States.”
“We applaud the revamped strategy’s attention to addressing the structural barriers to health care that have long fueled the HIV epidemic and have been exposed more broadly by the COVID-19 pandemic, including the need for an expanded and more diverse workforce,” Haddad said in a statement.
“We must now ensure it brings with it the momentum, policy change and resources necessary to accelerate efforts to end the HIV epidemic given the time and gains lost during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Haddad said. “We also must do all we can to put the COVID-19 pandemic behind us by expanding access to COVID-19 vaccines globally and supporting COVID-19 vaccine uptake and equitable access for people with HIV around the world.”
References:
Fact sheet: The Biden-Harris administration marks World AIDS Day 2021 with renewed commitment to ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030. Published Dec. 1, 2021. Accessed Dec. 1, 2021. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/12/01/fact-sheet-the-biden-%E2%81%A0harris-administration-marks-world-aids-day-2021-with-renewed-commitments-to-ending-the-hiv-aids-epidemic-by-2030/.
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White House. National HIV/AIDS Strategy. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/National-HIV-AIDS-Strategy.pdf. Accessed on Dec. 1, 2021.
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