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Trump Orders U.S. to Stop Distribution of Life-Saving HIV Drugs

PEPFAR, an international program which has long had bipartisan support, was created in 2003 by President George W. Bush.

President Donald Trump has paused funding for the popular and effective program for distributing HIV/AIDS medications known as PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. As a result of Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order halting the vast majority of foreign aid for at least 90 days, his administration has also ordered that those medications already on the shelves not be disbursed. Since its creation in 2003 by President George W. Bush, PEPFAR—which has a $6.5 billion annual budget—has saved an estimated 26 million lives and prevented millions of infections, according to the State Department. Yet the pause in funding, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce told NPR, is a “moral imperative.” The U.S., she added, “is no longer going to blindly dole out money with no return for the American people.” Trump famously told Howard Stern in 1997, that avoiding AIDS and STDs was his own “personal Vietnam.” “It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it. I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world, it is a dangerous world out there. It’s like Vietnam, sort of. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave solider,” Trump said. His mentor, Roy Cohn, was not so lucky however, dying from the virus in 1986. The bulk of PEPFAR’s work takes place in developing nations, where patients are already being turned away, The New York Times has reported. Jirair Ratevosian, the Biden administration’s chief of staff for PEPFAR, told the outlet, “This is another domino in the devastating impact of the harmful freeze to programs, leaving lives hanging in the balance.”