Biden Asks for Additional $267 Million to Fight HIV/AIDS

President Joe Biden is asking Congress for $267 million in order to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In his 2022 budget request, he requests this money be put toward prevention, research, and treatment of the virus.

The money Biden asked for will go to the Health and Human Services Department’s Ending the The HIV Epidemic program. The program received $117 million last year to both research solutions to the epidemic and provide funding to facilities treating those with HIV.

On his website, President Joe Biden lays out a plan to end the AIDS epidemic by 2025 by reducing the number of infections in the U.S to less than 3,000 a year. Biden has pledged full support to those living with HIV, including plans to fully fund the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program, which provides resources to those living with HIV.

Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in 1981, more than 700,000 have passed away due to the virus in the U.S. Globally, 42 million have passed away from complications due to the virus.

Around 14 million people in the U.S. are living with HIV. Around 14 percent of those people are not aware of their diagnoses and need testing.

While education and awareness around HIV/AIDS has increased in the past decade, the U.S still faces an uphill battle. Between 2014 and 2018, the number of new infections held steady. However, the number of people infected with HIV has decreased by two-thirds since the height of the epidemic in the mid-1980s.

This is a departure from former President’s Trump’s stance toward the AIDS epidemic, which saw the former president put forth a proposed $1.3 billion cut to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in 2019.

The move is seen as a step forward by activists, but they also acknowledge areas which need improvement in order to meet the administration’s lofty goals.

“While it falls short of what the community has requested, if this funding is realized it will continue the momentum already created and make further progress in ending HIV in the U.S.,” says Carl Schmid, executive director of the HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute, in a statement to the Washington Blade. “Efforts to end HIV will help eradicate an infectious disease that we have been battling for the last 40 years and help correct racial and health inequities in our nation.”

The additional funding will be helpful in the fight against this virus that has gone on for decades. While education and medicine like PrEP have helped in the fight against HIV, there is also newfound hope for a vaccine. Moderna recently held trials that yielded promising results for a HIV vaccine that used the same mRNA technology as their COVID-19 vaccine.