The Trump Administration's HIV Prevention Contradictions
Is shutting down the CDC's HIV prevention division a good idea?
HIV attacks the body's immune system and without treatment, it can lead to AIDS. The virus is transmitted via contact with body fluids such as semen, blood, and other bodily discharges.
The new head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has expressed some doubts about those facts. Now the Trump administration is contemplating the elimination of the HIV prevention division that is a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to NBC News.
If the CDC is anything, it is supposed to be the chief agency that detects, controls, and eliminates infectious diseases. HIV is just such a communicable microbe. The CDC estimates 31,800 Americans were infected with it in 2022, the year in which the latest data are available. The CDC also estimates that "approximately 1.2 million people in the U.S. have HIV. About 13 percent of them don't know it and need testing."
Oddly, efforts to cut back on the CDC's programs aimed at reducing HIV infections stand in contradiction to President Donald Trump's own Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. (EHE) initiative that he announced during his 2019 State of the Union address. Trump's original EHE goal was to end the HIV epidemic in the United States by 2030. The EHE initiative boosted preventative strategies including increased HIV testing and the promotion of effective new pre-exposure prophylaxis medications. Thanks in part to the EHE, the rate of HIV infections is down 19 percent since 2016.
The Trump administration's ultimate plans with respect to the CDC's HIV prevention division are not yet public, but some reporting suggests that at least some of its programs may be shifted to the Health Resources and Services Administration. As KFF, a health care policy nonprofit, observes, the agency's primary focus has historically been the delivery of medical care, not implementing preventive strategies.
"We are deeply concerned by the Trump administration's reckless moves to defund and deprioritize HIV prevention," warns a statement released on behalf of 13 LGBTQ+ and health care organizations. "These abrupt and incomprehensible possible cuts threaten to reverse decades of progress, exposing our nation to a resurgence of a preventable disease with devastating and avoidable human and financial costs."
It is certainly true that the CDC lost its focus on combatting infectious diseases over the decades. Instead, the agency turned more of its attention to non-communicable lifestyle "epidemics" of obesity, smoking, and violence. Attempting to remedy these lifestyle maladies actually seems more in line with HHS Secretary Kennedy's own priorities. "We're going to give drug development and infectious disease a break—a little break, a little bit of a break—for about eight years. And we're going to study chronic disease," RFK, Jr. said before suspending his presidential campaign. Infectious diseases are, however, not going to give the HHS secretary or the rest of us a break.
