12/02/2025
Today at the World AIDS Day event, our president Jesús Aguais spoke alongside UN ambassadors Sérgio Danese and Lise Gregoire-van, and UNAIDS leaders César Nuñez and Keren Dunaway, addressing the urgent threats facing the global AIDS response.
His call was urgent and non-negotiable: we must DEMAND full, sustained, and predictable funding for the global AIDS response.
Over 37 years, the global HIV activism movement has achieved incredible progress in treatment access, prevention, and advocacy. But we stand at a precarious moment. Today, 40.8 million people worldwide live with HIV. Of those, 5.3 million don’t know their status, and 9.2 million lack access to life-saving antiretroviral therapy. Meanwhile, 3,500 new infections occur every single day.
This year’s theme, “Overcoming Disruption, Transforming the AIDS Response,” couldn’t be more urgent. Right now, ideological attacks threaten to undo decades of progress and put millions of lives at risk. We’ve made real progress in reducing stigma and expanding access, but political forces are actively working to cut the funding that keeps people alive.
Let us be clear: A cut to global AIDS funding is a death sentence. We’re not talking about numbers in a dataset, we’re talking about families, children, mothers who need life-saving antiretroviral drugs, testing, and prevention tools to access the most basic human right: health.
Together with UNAIDS, the call is to find the path once again to reach our goal of ending AIDS by 2030.
