US Shouldn't Back Out of Funding HIV Research After Huge Strides Made: Patrick Sullivan, DVM, PhD

Patrick Sullivan, DVM, PhD, an infectious disease epidemiologist and professor of epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, discussed his analysis which found that cutting funding for HIV prevention could lead to higher rates of infection and higher costs. Sullivan reiterated that the government should stay the course when it came to funding research on HIV prevention, as breakthroughs have been coming rapidly in the space that may lead to a cure.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity; captions are auto-generated.

Transcript

What should be the next move in addressing the cuts to HIV prevention funding?

I think there are several cuts that are going to be particularly harmful to our efforts in HIV prevention. For example, fully funding the CDC Division of HIV Prevention, including HIV surveillance and testing programs. Every one of those components is doing an active public health good and moving us closer to reducing infections and ending the epidemic. Ryan White parts A through F and the Ending the HIV Epidemic funding. This is funding that goes across CDC, HRSA, Indian Health Service, NIH. These are really about programming that helps support prevention and CDC, historically, was the pipeline for a lot of those HIV prevention dollars. When we say [that] I think it's characterized as we're putting money into big government. No, we're putting money into a place in government that then gets it out to the state and local health departments who need to do this work and provide support for them and technical resources for them to do that work.

I think we just have to reiterate that we have 2 great tools that had us on the path to ending the epidemic. Those are pre-exposure prophylaxis for people who are at risk for acquiring HIV and that is treatment for people who are living with HIV, which leads to a normal, full lifespan for them, and eliminates the possibility that onward HIV transmissions occur when people are living with HIV and are fully virally suppressed. We really, again, consider both of these factors in the analysis, but it just illustrates how nonsensical it is to [not] invest. And they're huge national US investments, and ones that I'm proud of as a taxpayer and as a researcher, that the US really did commit to, through NIH funding, through global leadership, through the involvement of pharma and innovation to developing the treatments and the preventive therapies that you see today. It was a global effort, for sure, but the US put up a lot of resources to invest in these things.

And now that the investments have been made, and then they were made successfully, and we now have these tools, the same government is going to walk back from the benefits of those, from the benefits of health for our population, from the benefits of cost saving, because it's cheaper to keep people healthy than to let them get sick. This is one of those rare times when what's good for patients and what's good for providers and what's good for the budget and what's good in terms of just social justice, everything lines up. Where is the winner in pulling back from treatments that save money, improve health, improve the workforce? Reap the returns on investment that this country has made. The data are just as clear as they can be, that if we make cuts now, it's more infections now it's higher costs down the road, and the alternative is to maintain the things that have been working.

We should show just that trend in infections, that downward trend that we've seen year over year after year after year after year that anybody who's been in a in 1 math class can look and say that's good news. If that line is new infections, that's good news. We need to just maintain and we need to keep strategically growing the money for prevention, care, research. It's fiscally responsible. And we're really at a pivotal point in the HIV epidemic. We're making gains. We're on the way to ending the epidemic, and we just have to really speak up now for maintaining those efforts and getting where we all want to be, which is a world where people living with HIV live long, healthy lives, or eventually a cure is developed, and where there are no new HIV infections, because we know how to prevent them. We just can't back off now.