South Africa’s efforts to maintain its fight against HIV-Aids, despite the massive funding cuts from the United States, have been acknowledged by United Nations under-secretary general and UNAids executive director Winnie Byanyima, who visited the country last week.
However, Byanyima conceded that the withdrawal of the nearly $8bn in funding from the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) for local HIV/Aids organisations would present a challenge.
News24 reports that earlier in the week, she had a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa and Minister of Health Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, during which UNAids’ support for South Africa’s national Close the Gap campaign was reaffirmed.
Of the campaign, which plans to get people with HIV but who were not receiving treatment on to antiretroviral drugs (ARVs), she said UNAids was supporting the government to find these missing people.
UNAids was also happy with the work Motsoaledi was doing in leading a campaign to trace the estimated 1.1m people who had dropped out of their HIV treatment programmes and get them back on track, she added, but was “very concerned” about the number of people not getting treatment because of the funding cuts.
She commended the Health Department’s efforts to transfer the files of patients at Pepfar-funded clinics to state-run facilities after they closed, and said the government’s efforts were “encouraging”.
“We are seeing it across Africa, where (governments) are making the effort to close the gap.”
She said there was always going to come a time when “global solidarity to help the world fight the disease was going to end”, but that its sudden removal had left countries ill-prepared to fill the gap.
“Unfortunately, the government didn’t have time to prepare. But it is now stepping up,” she said, adding she was also buoyed by the efforts of civil society.
She had a successful meeting with Ramaphosa, she noted, and they had also discussed lenacapavir, Gilead’s hugely effective HIV prevention drug.
The cost for the drug is $25 000 for two injections a year, and while it was “out of reach” for most, researchers had indicated it could be rolled out at just $40 per person a year if Gilead would allow global production of generics.
UNAids was talking to Gilead and they hoped Ramaphosa would help champion the cause in the same way he had called for vaccine-sharing during the Covid pandemic, she said.
“We hope to work with him to fight the price. Gilead has licensed six companies to produce generics and has agreed to sell at cost quantities for 2m people. But it is way below what is needed,” she said. “We need huge production of the drug and for the prices to come down.”
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