#aids-denialism

#aids-denialism

On that sunny March morning, in a small health center in Lobamba, a rural area of Eswatini, this 32-year-old sex worker has just become one of the first people in the world to receive lenacapavir, a drug that, administered twice a year, offers nearly 100% protection against HIV.

Congress has kept key drug assistance funding at $900.3 million annually since 2014. New enrollments for state programs jumped 30% from 2022 to 2024, in part because states cut off pandemic-era Medicaid assistance. As of January, at least 18 states have pulled back their Ryan White AIDS Drug Assistance Programs, known as ADAPs, in some way.

Gay dance clubs, besides offering sweaty, blissful spaces to let loose, served as safe havens during the darkest days of the crisis. Places where the LGBTQ community gathered for emotional support, to share vital information, and to raise money for AIDS groups like ACT UP, GMHC, and amfAR.

During the summer of 2020, at the onset of the Covid pandemic, the documentary director Matt Nadel was back home in Boca Raton, Florida. He remembers one particular evening walk that he took with his father, Phil, as they weathered out those early months. As they strode through the neighborhood, Nadel, now 26, said that the prospect of a vaccine was exciting, but the idea of pharmaceutical executives profiting off a devastating virus left him feeling uneasy.

I finally spent the night at his place, and we hooked up that night and again the next morning. I stayed most of the day and was getting ready to leave when he told me he's HIV-positive. I gave him a kiss and said I understood and that this changed nothing between us, but honestly, I was disappointed he was only telling me now.

For more than a decade, doctors and researchers have announced that a handful of people around the world have been cured of HIV. Each of these patients has experienced long-term viral control - in some cases for over a decade - without antiretroviral therapy (ART), as AIDSMap notes, though some doctors describe them as being in "remission." While the patients have shown no signs of HIV since stopping ART, at least some uncertainty remains as to whether the virus could eventually rebound in them.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

the research would have followed 14,000 infants in the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. The problem? Only 7,000 of those newborns would have received an urgently needed hepatitis B vaccine, in order to compare the two groups. On top of the flagrant ethics violations, the total cost of the research would have exceeded the cost to pay for "over a decade's worth of Hepatitis B vaccine birth doses [for everyone] in Guinea-Bissau."

By the mid-1980s, the AIDS epidemic had completely gripped the nation. Its victims, primarily queer men, were dying by the thousands. Fear and misinformation reigned supreme, and our government refused to respond to the crisis. Reverend Charles Angel, a community leader and activist who was living with HIV himself, recognized that queer men of color faced additional disparities due to cultural norms and societal inequities.

The World Health Organization announced in late January that six European countries: the United Kingdom, Spain, Austria, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan had all officially lost their measles elimination status, which means the virus has been circulating continuously in those countries for more than 12 months.

As, Dr. Bill Lipsky noted in his 2022 remembrance for the San Francisco Bay Times, Campbell had been diagnosed with Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) the previous October, becoming just the 16th person in the city to be diagnosed with the rare form of skin cancer that was suddenly popping up among young men. During those early days of the epidemic, before doctors identified HIV and AIDS, patients like Campbell were described as having "gay cancer."

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As, Dr. Bill Lipsky noted in his 2022 remembrance for the San Francisco Bay Times, Campbell had been diagnosed with Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) the previous October, becoming just the 16th person in the city to be diagnosed with the rare form of skin cancer that was suddenly popping up among young men. During those early days of the epidemic, before doctors identified HIV and AIDS, patients like Campbell were described as having "gay cancer."

Black people made up 48 percent of new HIV diagnoses in the South, but only 21 percent of PrEP users in the South; in the Midwest, Black people made up 48 percent of new HIV diagnoses, but only 12 percent of PrEP users. This regional disparity demonstrates the significant gap between HIV burden and preventive medication access among Black populations across different areas of the country.