COVID-19 has wreaked havoc in fight against AIDS, UNAIDS chief says

UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima poses for a portrait following an interview in New York, NY, United States, February 11, 2018. REUTERS / Andrew Kelly

CHICAGO, December 1 (Reuters) – New infections and deaths from HIV / AIDS could increase as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted prevention measures, UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima said in a statement interview broadcast Wednesday during the Reuters Next conference.

Byanyima, who is also the United Nations Under-Secretary-General, said that during the first pandemic phase in particular, fewer people chose to be tested and some dropped out of treatment due to long queues at clinics. or other public security measures that impeded access to preventive measures.

“We expect that in the years to come we may see more deaths, we may see more new infections as a result of these disruptions,” she said in the pre-recorded interview broadcast to the occasion of World AIDS Day.

Byanyima said vaccine nationalism, in which rich countries buy vaccine supplies and poor countries wait, has been “one of the saddest aspects of our situation.”

While rich countries have accumulated vaccines, just over 7% of Africa’s population has been fully vaccinated, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.

Some scientists believe this may have been a factor in the development of Omicron, the new variant first discovered in southern Africa that has raised concerns about the chances that vaccines will not be effective against it.

“It’s no coincidence for most of us that this happened in sub-Saharan Africa, where you have a lot of underdiagnosed HIV infections, or people who are immunocompromised with it,” said John Moore. , professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill. Cornell Medical College in New York, in a separate interview.

Moore said people who are immunocompromised cannot clear the infection as quickly as those with healthy immune systems, and that a suboptimal immune response may allow the virus to continue to mutate.

“This is how the other variants are thought to have arisen – in people who are immunocompromised,” he said.

Byanyima said research shows people living with HIV are no more likely than others to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, but that once infected, they are at much higher risk of serious illness.

“This is why for developing countries with high HIV burden, this is essential,” she said of access to COVID-19 vaccines.

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Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Richard Chang

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