A new drug that gives almost complete protection against the virus was to be administered across Africa this year. Now, much of the funding for that effort is gone.
This was supposed to be a breakthrough year in the 44-year-long struggle against H.I.V.
Decades of research and investment produced new approaches to vaccines that were going into their first significant clinical trials.
The hunt for a cure was homing in on key mechanisms to block the virus, which can lurk dormant and near-untraceable in the body for years.
Most critically, a breakthrough preventive drug, lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injection that offers total protection from H.I.V., was to be rapidly rolled out across eastern and southern Africa. The main target: young women. About 300,000 of them were newly infected with the virus last year — half of all new infections worldwide.
Every one of these plans has been derailed by the Trump administration’s slashing of foreign assistance.
There is more potential than ever before to end the H.I.V. epidemic, scientists and public health experts say. But now, H.I.V. programs across Africa are scrambling to procure drugs that the United States once supplied, replace lost nurses and lab technicians, and restart shuttered programs to prevent new infections.
“We imagined we would be in a different world right now,” said Dr. Leila Mansoor, a senior research scientist at the Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in Durban, South Africa. She had planned to spend 2025 analyzing data from one H.I.V. prevention trial, preparing for another and tracking how lenacapavir was transforming the epidemic — alongside colleagues testing new vaccines and cure strategies.
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