By Emma Black
April 11, 2025 this week’s Global Health Watch from AVAC lays bare a storm rocking, looming tariffs to leadership gaps at the CDC and legal wins shielding research, the ripples could sink or save HIV prevention and care worldwide, here’s what’s at stake and where hope holds.
The Biden administration’s push for new tariffs revived with a nod from the President at a Tuesday dinner spells trouble for HIV tools. While medicines dodge the hit for now, diagnostics, syringes, and antiretroviral ingredients face price spikes, AVAC warns costs climb, deliveries stall, health systems buckle North and South alike. compounding the mess, FDA layoffs gut inspectors, slowing overseas production checks, tariff-dodging manufacturing shifts, expect delays and chaos.
A federal judge slammed the brakes on a plan to cap National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant overheads at 15% a cut that’d have gutted billions from labs and universities. It’s a win, but the threat lingers an appeal loom, and prior grant slashes already sting, Nature and Axios flag the fallout early-stage and minority-led HIV research hit hardest, widening an innovation gap that could haunt us.
The US CDC’s in freefall no legal acting director after Dr. Susan Monarez’s nomination disqualified her, with STIs surging and drug resistance creeping, it’s a brutal time to wobble. Dr. Colleen Kelley, testifying to congress, didn’t mince words CDC’s prevention arm is our HIV backbone its chaos costs lives, decisions now fall to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose vaccine doubts spark fears of science sidelined, trust hangs by a thread.
Amid the gloom, PEPFAR shines, a House hearing saw bipartisan cheers for its 26 million lives saved and 200% boost to local health budgets since 2004, per Ambassador Mark Dybul and EGPAF’s Catherine Connor. But a Lancet study by Lucie Cluver throws shade: funding cuts could tank kids’ health and unravel HIV gains in Africa. PEPFAR’s no luxury it’s a must.
Brightest spark over 80 Black researchers, led by PrEP in Black America (PIBA), unveiled the first national Black HIV Prevention Research Agenda. It’s a thunderclap centering Black voices to overhaul how HIV science gets funded and done, AVAC’s John Meade calls it reckoning and resistance, Paired with last October’s global People’s Research Agenda, it’s a one-two punch for equity-driven progress.
AVAC’s February lawsuit forced the US to unfreeze foreign aid, but red tape still strangles programs in the Global South, on PxPulse Live, AVAC’s Mitchell Warren and Public Citizen’s Lauren Bateman sounded the alarm: Uncertainty’s a death sentence for millions relying on US health aid, every lag bites.
Global Health Watch sums it grim Political churn threatens science, equity, lives, yet flickers of fight court wins, Black-led agendas, PEPFAR’s pulse show what’s possible. HIV’s future isn’t just policy; it’s people demanding better, louder, now.