Health Affairs Blog: Don’t Put The Brakes On Ending AIDS
Chris Collins, vice president and director of public policy at amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, and Matthew Kavanagh, a senior policy analyst for Health Global Access Project, Mumford Doctoral Fellow in Politics at the University of Pennsylvania, and fellow at the Center for Public Health Initiatives

“Our estimates suggest that if President Obama and Congress can work together to reverse the PEPFAR cuts over the next two years — increasing the PEPFAR bilateral budget by $400 million in 2015 and again in 2016 — we can stay on our current trajectory [of treatment scale-up]. This moves us toward achieving the United Nations target of 15 million people with HIV on treatment by the end of 2015, and it also means reaching an end to the AIDS epidemic sooner. Sustaining this course, however, requires that the State Department free some money for HIV treatment in the current fiscal year, and continue to push for modest reductions in the PEPFAR cost of treatment. Without new treatment funding in fiscal year 2014, the pace of scale-up will slow markedly this year. … Congress and the Administration must find the resources to keep PEPFAR on track to accelerate the end of AIDS” (1/27).