WASHINGTON — President Trump is expected to announce in his State of the Union speech a national commitment to end transmission of the virus that causes AIDS, with a goal of stopping its spread in this country by 2030.
A senior administration official with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s preparations confirmed the plan on Monday, in advance of the address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday evening. Government scientists have been working for months on the plan, which calls for an expanded effort to prevent infections and to treat those with H.I.V. It also calls for a greater use of certain medicines to reduce the chances that people at very high risk will become infected.
Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, has described the goal this way: “to become a country where the spread of H.I.V. has been effectively halted, because every American with H.I.V./AIDS is receiving treatment and every American at risk for H.I.V. is engaged in the right, proven prevention strategy.”
Treatment is prevention, officials say. “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.
“We have driven the incidence of H.I.V. infections down dramatically since the early 1990s,” Mr. Azar said, but new infections in recent years have remained at roughly the same level, around 40,000 a year. “With the tools we have today,” he said, “we can do much better.”
Carl E. Schmid II, the deputy executive director of the AIDS Institute, a public policy and advocacy organization, said Mr. Trump’s plan sounded “very bold” and “could be one of his greatest achievements,” if the president and Congress provide enough funds.
Carolyn McAllaster, a law professor at Duke University who specializes in H.I.V. policy and law, applauded the plan, first reported by Politico. But she said that people who research the disease hoped the administration would focus on groups of people who did not have access to health care or preventive treatment, including rural communities in the South where H.I.V. is stigmatized.
“A strategy to address the H.I.V. epidemic must avoid further stigmatizing already marginalized communities,” Ms. McAllaster said, “including the L.G.B.T.Q. community and racial minorities.” Read more via Washington Post