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This week the G7 meets in Cornwall. The fight against pandemics is at the top of the list and in this context Boris Johnson is expected to urge the group of rich countries to commit to vaccinating the world against Covid-19 by the end of next year. This is a bold and ambitious goal – but it is not enough – we will need more than promises to make it a reality.
Ambitious but plausible goals have also been set in the fight to end AIDS, but the world has fallen far behind those goals because the promises have not come true. We run the risk of the same problem happening in the fight against COVID-19, and for this reason, world leaders in the HIV and AIDS movement want to highlight how lessons learned in the fight against AIDS can play a role. key role in tackling this problem and the future. pandemics.
Although pandemics are high on the summit’s agenda, there is little recognition on the agenda that the world is handling not one, but a collection of pandemics, and that these pandemics can only be defeated. together.
One of those pandemics, which turned 40 this month, is the AIDS crisis. In four decades, great strides have been made in the prevention and treatment of HIV, but these advances have not prevented people from becoming infected and have not prevented AIDS-related deaths. To date, 33 million people have died and currently there is a very real risk that new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths will increase for the first time in decades.
At next week’s summit, Boris Johnson and G7 leaders must acknowledge one simple fact. That the Covid-19 crisis – by shutting down health services, schools and livelihoods – has created the risk of a new AIDS emergency.
This message came loud and clear from the communities, partners and grassroots organizations that we support. Communities where AIDS is not something associated with the 80s and 90s, but continues to be a very real presence in people’s lives.
Over the past year, we have heard time and time again about the disappearance of HIV services, in some cases overnight. We have heard of teenage girls being excluded from the protective environment of schools and pushed into coercive relationships, with an increase in teenage pregnancies corroborating these stories.
The data may not yet show it – which is not surprising when the Global Fund, the world’s largest funder of the AIDS response, reports that HIV testing has declined by 41% – but we we expect an increase in HIV infections to follow. Frontline AIDS Rapid Response Fund, with support from the Elton John AIDS Foundation, provided emergency aid to hundreds of young gay men and other criminalized populations, who have been baselessly blamed for the spread of Covid-19, and locked up in prisons or sent to camps where they do not have access to life-saving HIV treatment.
While fighting this new AIDS emergency, our partners also play an essential role in the fight against this latest pandemic, by adapting their programs to include prevention and screening for Covid-19 and to deal with the health, social and economics of containment. Often, they say, their governments have approached the Covid-19 crisis with the same mistakes made in responding to HIV – top-down, punitive, and excluding the community organizations that are a critical part of tackling any pandemic.
They want the G7 and other governments to understand this key message. In this acute Covid-19 crisis, in which people living with HIV are among the most affected, they are not simply asking governments to maintain their goal of ending AIDS by 2030; they offer help.
For four decades, communities, NGOs, health systems and global health institutions have worked together to fight HIV and can be an invaluable resource in the fight against other pandemics – providing delivery mechanisms, community mobilization, supply chains, laboratory and surveillance capacities, as well as with forty years of learning and at the time of containments linked to Covid-19, a new expertise in the switch to online services. Governments must harness and boost investment in this incredible infrastructure in the midst of – and indeed as part of its response to Covid-19. This is the call we hear again and again from HIV organizations across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Last week, world leaders in the HIV response united with royalty, lords and business leaders; Adapted former presidents have joined stars in music, film and sports, to write Boris Johnson at the helm of the upcoming summit with a simple request:
In the face of this new AIDS emergency, the G7 must recognize and embrace the message of the bright, dynamic, talented, wise and grassroots-led HIV movement, telling them this: We, at the forefront of the fight against HIV, are here help; recognize our contribution, fund ourselves, exploit what we contribute. We can help you defeat Covid, defeat AIDS, and defeat future pandemics to come.
Anne Aslett is CEO of the Elton John AIDS Foundation; and Christine Stegling is CEO of Frontline AIDS
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