Trump To Announce 10-Year Plan To Fight HIV During State Of The Union: Report
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
President Donald Trump will announce a 10-year plan to fight HIV in the U.S. during his State of the Union speech Tuesday, according to four unnamed sources cited by Politico.
The Trump administration’s strategy would “target the U.S. communities with the most HIV infections and work to reduce transmissions by 2030,” reported Politico Monday.
Because of modern medicine, an HIV/AIDS diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, but the epidemic still affects roughly 40,000 new patients each year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data .
Trump’s reported announcement may seem out of the blue, but it is not that surprising given that the CDC’s relatively new director, Robert Redfield, had an extensive career researching HIV/AIDS, reported Politico.
Redfield took over the CDC in March 2018 and has predicted the HIV/AIDS epidemic could be over by 2025.
“Ending the AIDS epidemic in America? It’s possible. I think it could be done in the next three to seven years, if we put our mind to it,” Redfield said at a CDC staff meeting on his second day at the agency in 2018, reported STAT News .
The 10-year HIV plan has a lofty goal: stopping all new infections within the decade, reported Politico. The reported plan would begin with five years focusing on communities where HIV infections are most widespread. Southern and northeastern states report the highest numbers of HIV-positive people, according to CDC data .
Presidents often use State of the Union addresses to push for public health goals. Then-president Barack Obama announced an initiative to “cure cancer” in his 2016 State of the Union address, reported TIME .
In the public health arena, Trump’s administration has focused on issues like the opioid crisis and rising prescription drug costs. Trump said the U.S. “will prevail” over the national opioid epidemic during his first State of the Union address in 2017.
Gay or bisexual men make up about two-thirds of new HIV infections, according to Politico. Trump’s reported announcement about the HIV strategy comes after Vice President Mike Pence’s wife was bashed for teaching at a private Christian school in Virginia that “reserves the right to refuse applicants or expel students who engage in homosexual or transgendered behavior.”
Trump faced criticism for looking into cuts to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), but he extended the program in December 2018.
Trump will deliver his State of the Union speech weeks after it was originally scheduled because after going back and forth with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the partial government shutdown.
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I will be awaiting that magical moment when Trump announces that he is the first person to ever care about HIV and that it was being "totally ignored" until he came along to cure it.
If we're lucky he might even claim that he has discovered a new disease, human immunodeficiency virus, that no one has ever heard of.
And it will be a really terrific, terrific cure. A cure so good, no one else could come up with it. LoL
His cure would be worse than a fatal disease, if the rest of his policies are any examples.
Is it some kind of contest for you to see who cares the most? Would you rather Trump ignore the issue?
Given Trump's intellectual depth and shallow understanding of issues, that answer would be an unqualified yes. This should be left up to the CDC.
No we just remember when Trump vowed to declare the opoid problem a national emergency which would have allocated over a billion dollars to treatment. Instead he declared it a public health emergency which allocated a whopping 57K! Forgive us if we seem a little skeptical
The Center for Donald Control...?
Maybe Trump will try to ban gay people..............
He's going to finally conquer his own personal Viet nam.
So?
That’s the first thing that came to my mind. Who better to to take on HIV than the coward who shirked his draft responsibilities to combat STDs instead?
This HIV fight should have been started in the 1980's, when the disease first came to prominence. Unfortunately, any such effort was not encouraged at the time. While treatments have progressed to the point where HIV can be slowed and life prolonged, both qualitatively and quantitatively, developing an actual cure or vaccination against it is quite problematic and not likely within 10 years, given the nature of the HIV itself. But hopefully, progress will continue until a cure is discovered.
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New HIV Infections Drop 18 Percent in Six Years | HIV.gov
Let's be honest. His speechwriter figures "who can be against fighting AIDS?" and put it in the speech as an example of Trump "uniting" the nation. Thats about all this is.
Just what does Karen Pence's teaching job have to do with the HIV epidemic?
And forgive me if I don't hold my breath on this "10 year plan". Sounds an awful lot like Stalin's 5 year plans
A) Either one of the drug manufacturers is on the breakpoint of a vaccine and he's going to claim credit for it...
OR
B) Everyone else has kicked his ass...let's watch a bug do it.
OR
One off the "payoffs" wasn't exactly "Fresh as a daisy" and he's desperate.