The global Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has warned that South Africa’s planned rollout of HIV prevention shot lenacapavir (LEN) is being jeopardised by the Trump administration’s funding cuts that have dismantled delivery systems, reports Business Day.
The National Department of Health received its first shipment of LEN earlier this month, but the funding withdrawal has eviscerated the systems required to provide it, according to a report from the non-profit PHR, released on Tuesday.
Drawing on interviews with 40 South African doctors, researchers, people with HIV and others involved in the country’s efforts to combat HIV, it said the Trump administration had wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in prior investments by abandoning HIV prevention programmes and technologies designed to support large-scale HIV prevention efforts, including lenacapavir.
“Our report illustrates what an ‘America First’ approach to global health looks like: life-saving programmes shuttered, world-class research jettisoned, decades of progress against HIV/Aids jeopardised. All to the harm of not only South Africans but to Americans and the global public as well,” said Thomas McHale, Director of Public Health at PHR and a report co-author.
“US policy decisions have resulted in a colossal waste of resources and decades of investments in the global HIV/Aids response,” he added.
The specialised HIV prevention programmes established in South Africa to provide medicines – like cabotegravir – that protect people from the virus, have collapsed since the American government cut the decades-long support it had provided to South Africa via Pepfar, according to Francois Venter, Executive Director of the Ezintsha Research Institute at Wits.
“And for lenacapavir to work, you need a delivery platform. But the systems have been almost completely dismantled,” he said.
The government will fund the initial rollout of lenacapavir with part of an existing grant from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria. The first batch of the medicine, which consisted of 37 920 doses, arrived in South Africa in early April, but the Health department has yet to finalise a launch date for the programme.
The department was not immediately available to comment.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Lenacapavir to be rolled out via Pepfar to selected countries
Delayed anti-HIV doses of LEN land in SA
Lessons learnt in the anti-HIV drug race as CAB-LA falls behind LEN