Biden Campaign Holds “HIV/AIDS Solidarity Event” While People With HIV Demand: Where is Biden’s Plan for Ending AIDS As a Global Public Health Threat?

Health GAP released the following statement from Jason Walker, Senior Coordinator for Grassroots Advocacy: 

“Later today, the Biden campaign will hold an ‘HIV/AIDS solidarity event,’ hosted by LGBTQ+ for Biden. But people with HIV around the world need more than an event, and despite the campaign’s recent flurry of policy platforms, Vice President Biden has not released a plan to ensure people around the world have access to life-saving HIV treatment and prevention—needs that have become even more urgent as the COVID-19 pandemic rages and destabilizes the global HIV response. 

“With Election Day less than four months away, Biden is overdue in releasing a plan to leverage the money, policies, and commitment to human rights needed to put the HIV response back on track and end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. The Vice President should adopt the End Pandemics 2020 platform—a bold plan to halt today’s pandemic killers of AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria—and prevent the pandemics of tomorrow.”

The End Pandemics 2020 campaign released a letter to U.S. presidential candidates signed by more than 60 organizations asking candidates to put forward their plans to renew American leadership to advance health security and end pandemics of today and tomorrow. By endorsing the End Pandemics platform, Biden would commit his administration to: 

• Double U.S. investment in a transformative whole-of-government effort to both end global AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria and ensure low- and middle-income countries can detect disease and advance the health of their people before outbreaks become pandemics. Funding must be additional to other programs that build a healthy and resilient world.
• Recognize climate change is affecting health and invest in early warning systems and adaptation efforts to address disease challenges posed by a warming planet as part of a bold climate strategy. 
• Focus not just on protecting American lives but on lifting the health of the most vulnerable globally through strategic investments in health workforce, infrastructure, laboratories, and data systems.
• Harness the best of American innovation, research, and technology to fight pandemics while ensuring trade agreements and intellectual property rules expand (not undermine) affordable access globally.
• Challenge other countries to join us in a global effort to stop pandemics—using all avenues from the UN to direct diplomacy to push wealthy countries to match our increased international funding and low- and middle-income countries to increase domestic investment. 
• Ensure U.S. foreign assistance is grounded in anti-discriminatory, human rights-based approaches, and is responsive to the needs of the people affected.

“Pandemics drive inequality and injustice globally,” continued Walker. “LGBTQ+ people, people of color, the poor, migrants, women, and young people bear the biggest burden—and they need more than solidarity in this moment as multiple pandemics, including racism, collide. Today’s campaign event boasts a panel of experts, but what would be better is if the Vice President himself spoke to the community and adopted the End Pandemics platform, committing his administration to the kind of bold action on global health that he has promised on climate change.” 

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About Health GAP: Health GAP is an international advocacy organization dedicated to ensuring that all people living with HIV have access to affordable life sustaining medicines. Our team pairs pragmatic policy work with audacious grassroots action to win equitable access to treatment, care and prevention for people living with and affected by HIV worldwide. We are dedicated to eliminating barriers to universal access to affordable life sustaining medicines for people living with HIV/AIDS as key to a comprehensive strategy to confront and ultimately stop the AIDS pandemic. We believe that the human right to life and to health must prevail over the pharmaceutical industry’s excessive profits and expanding patent rights.