World is so close to ending Aids pandemic but must keep funding ‘miracle’ drugs, UN chief warns
The UK should “fight to the finish line” and help end the Aids pandemic, especially with “miracle” prevention drugs now available, the head of UNAIDS has urged amid unprecedented global aid cuts.
The world was on track to ending the HIV/Aids pandemic by 2030.
But massive reductions in funding from the US, Europe and now the UK have caused the “biggest ever disruption” to services, Winnie Byanyima, UNAIDS executive director, told the Independent ahead of the launch of UNAIDS’s annual report on Tuesday.
If these cuts continue, in the same time frame there will be millions more deaths and infections, as well as double the number of medication-resistant strains, according to The Independent’s own modelling of data in an eight-month project reporting across Uganda, Zimbabwe and Senegal.
This will likely worsen as further reductions to UK foreign aid spending are expected to be announced at the end of the year. The Independent is urging Sir Keir Starmer to ring-fence this funding in a campaign launched this week ahead of World Aids Day on December 1.
Byanyima, who is from Uganda and lost her own brother to Aids, urged the UK to protect the remaining funding, particularly given new prevention tools – like Lenacapivar – are on the cusp of being rolled out which could bring new infections down to zero.
“We are so close to finishing this race. 40 years ago we had nothing. Today we have a range of tools that could help us to stop new infections completely, and we have treatment tools that keep people healthy for the rest of their lives,” Byanyima said, speaking from South Africa, home to the world’s largest number of people living with HIV.
“We have on the market now, these tools we call magical. Lenacapavir [injection] has almost 100 per cent efficacy. If you take it, you will not get infected, and it’s injectable once every six months.
“On the prevention side… This is a miracle for us…. We need to move it fast and at scale.
“The UK has been one of the first, the most consistent and steady supporters of the global Aids response, putting its aid money behind developing countries that need it.
“32 million people worldwide are already on treatment. But we still need to bring 9 million people onto treatment. We can race to the finish line.”
Cuts are “alarming”
This year has seen an unprecedented crisis for the global HIV/Aids response.
It started in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency when he slashed millions of dollars of USAID funding to PEPFAR, its global HIV/Aids response programme. For many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the healthcare system was almost entirely reliant on that money and so the abrupt withdrawal, with no time to diversify, was deadly.
