The president who fired his HIV/AIDS advisory council a year ago and has no one working in the Office of National AIDS Policy pivoted on Tuesday night, pledging to focus fresh money and knowledge to eradicate the epidemic.

In his State of the Union address, President Trump went beyond the promises of any of his predecessors since AIDS appeared as a deadly scourge nearly four decades ago. He announced a strategy to stop the spread of HIV by 2030 by concentrating as-yet-unspecified resources on 48 counties and other “hot spots” where half the nation’s new infections occur.

“Scientific breakthroughs have brought a once-distant dream within reach,” the president said in the latter part of his annual agenda-setting speech to both chambers of Congress. “Together, we will defeat AIDS in America and beyond.”

The president did not identify how much additional money the government would devote to the effort, saying only that his budget “will ask Democrats and Republicans to make the needed commitment to eliminate the HIV epidemic in the United States within 10 years.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Tuesday that the sums requested by several of his top public health officials to accomplish this goal will be in the president’s budget next month. He, too, did not specify an amount.

Longtime AIDS activist Carl Schmid, deputy executive director of the AIDS Institute and one of the two new co-chairs of the White House’s HIV/AIDS advisory council, called the administration’s plans “a bold initiative.” But, he added, “there is a lot of distrust in the HIV community, and rightly so. In the next couple of days and weeks, the administration will have to prove themselves that they are serious about this. . . . The additional resources will be needed.”

The administration’s plan follows a 2010 HIV/AIDS strategy that the Obama administration devised and updated five years later. Read more via Washington Post