“The Trump administration has moved to end funding for a broad swath of HIV vaccine research, saying current approaches are enough to counter the virus,” CBS News reports.
“The Administration believes the United States should have the best medical research in the world. To that end, we are advancing policies to maximize the impact of every federal taxpayer dollar and ensure proper oversight of this funding,” HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said.
In recent years, the number of Americans dying from AIDS has significantly decreased compared to the epidemic’s early years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were 4,941 deaths attributed to HIV/AIDS in the United States in 2022, which translates to a rate of 1.5 deaths per 100,000 population.
Other sources report that in 2022, nearly 5,000 people died with HIV as the underlying cause of death, and about 8,000 died with HIV as a contributing cause of death.
In 2021, there were approximately 6,310 AIDS-related deaths in the U.S..
“For HIV vaccine design and development, we’ve begun to see light at the end of the tunnel after many years of research. This is a terrible time to cut it off. We’re beginning to get close. We’re getting good results out of clinical trials,” Dennis Burton, an immunology professor at Scripps Research, told CBS News.
Experts also argue that while new drugs like lenacapavir (a twice-yearly injectable HIV prevention medication) are promising, they do not replace the need for a vaccine. The only way to truly end the HIV epidemic, they assert, is with an effective vaccine.