“We will not go back!”: a powerful, resolute response to funding cuts at IAS 2025

One year ago, UNAIDS announced that the HIV response was at a critical crossroads. Apart from a handful of countries, the world was not on track to meet the ambitious 2030 goals: 95% of those with HIV diagnosed, 95% of those diagnosed on treatment, and 95% of those on treatment virally suppressed. The impending 2025 global targets, of fewer than 400,000 new HIV acquisitions and 250,000 AIDS-related deaths yearly, would not be met either.

However, there were hopeful signs: sub-Saharan Africa has continued to make remarkable progress towards these goals. With the results of the PURPOSE 1 and 2 trials announced last year – showing lenacapavir to be a potent prevention tool with only two injections a year – there was a renewed energy and hope that HIV could finally be eliminated as a public health threat.

That was all before the entire global HIV response was turned upside down by the US government’s sweeping funding cuts this January. Now, questions that haven’t been pondered in decades – such as where to find the money for basic HIV services – are being asked again.

The 13th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science (IAS 2025), taking place this week in Kigali, Rwanda, would usually be focused on scientific advances. This year it is overwhelmingly focused on the funding crisis and what do about it. Governments, donors, HIV experts, healthcare workers, advocates and people living with HIV have been left floundering in the wake of the funding cuts; a rapid evolution in the response to HIV is urgently needed.

“We no longer stand at a crossroads,” Professor Linda-Gail Bekker of the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation in South Africa, stated during her moving address at the IAS 2025 opening session. “We now find ourselves at a precipice.”

Read the full news story at aidsmap.

All aidsmap reports from IAS 2025 can be accessed here.