If the Trump administration goes through with a plan to make major cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s HIV division, Georgia and other states in the Southeast would struggle to fill the void, experts told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Health and Human Services Department is weighing plans to make drastic cuts to the federal government’s funding for domestic HIV prevention.
The CDC, which sits within Health and Human Services, has a $1 billion HIV prevention budget that covers 91% of all federal funding toward that cause, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent source of health policy research, polling and journalism.
In Georgia, the CDC provides 95% of the state’s budget to combat HIV.
Ursula Bauer, former chronic diseases director of the CDC, said states in the Southeast would struggle to finance HIV prevention efforts without federal support.
“CDC trains the workforces in state health departments,” she said. “Even well-funded jurisdictions like New York will have a hard time without federal support — but states like Alabama and Mississippi which receive 100% of their HIV prevention funding from the federal government, will be decimated if these cuts go through.”
Leisha McKinley-Beach is a national HIV consultant and CEO of the Black Public Health Academy, which prepares Black health department employees for leadership positions. She said that because Georgia’s HIV prevention program is almost entirely funded by the federal government, cutting the CDC’s HIV prevention budget would specifically harm Georgia’s Department of Public Health and county governments.
“These are epidemiologists, researchers, medical staff,” she said. “Georgia gets this expertise without having to pay for it. If the CDC HIV prevention division were cut, presumably those jobs would be eliminated as well. It’s a double hit.
“I’m at a loss for words.”
In an emailed statement to the AJC, HHS said it is trying to reduce overlap “to support the President’s broader efforts to restructure the federal government to ensure that HHS better serves the American people.”
“No final decision on streamlining CDC’s HIV Prevention Division has been made,” spokesperson Emily G. Hilliard told the AJC.
Georgia stands to lose $21 million of its $22.4 million HIV prevention budget if the cuts go through.
CDC staff members work at DPH and within the Cobb, Gwinnett, Macon, and DeKalb county boards of health.
“DPH is working on a course of action should federal funding be reduced. We are awaiting additional guidance from our federal partners before we finalize our plans,” DPH spokesperson Nancy Nydam said.
On Thursday, a group of U.S. senators, led by Georgia’s Raphael Warnock, sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with questions, chief among them whether the CDC firings have surpassed 750 people.
“Many of these individuals, due to their level of expertise and experience, are difficult, if not impossible, to replace,” the letter said. “These actions will have long-term consequences in recruiting the next generation of public health leaders, a field that was already facing a deficit of 40,000 employees.”
The HIV prevention cuts would represent an about face for President Donald Trump, who in his first term said he wanted to end new HIV infections by 2030.
Dr. John Brooks, former chief medical officer to the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, said the economic impact of the cuts to Atlanta and the state more broadly would be noticeable since several hundred people work in the CDC’s HIV prevention division — which keeps track of new infections and can pinpoint when new infections spike, as occurred in 2016 when CDC detected and then helped quell an outbreak in Indiana among injection drug users.
He called the proposed cuts short sighted.
“Georgia is one of the most hard-hit regions for HIV in the nation. People often refer to it as ground zero,” Brooks said. “If you don’t treat people who have HIV, they become unhealthy, and develop illnesses that will be very, very expensive for our health care system to treat. So keeping people who have HIV healthy, and preventing new infections, saves all of us money.
“It’s also the ethical and right thing to do.”
PrEP can cost as little as $30 per month, or can be free to people with insurance. Experts say the medicines are 99% effective in preventing someone from catching HIV.
“With a few hundred dollars of medications and doctors’ visits, a person can go on PrEP,” said Patrick Sullivan, an epidemiologist at Emory University. “If someone acquires HIV, the lifetime healthcare costs can range from $500,000 to a million dollars.”
The CDC, which helps states like Georgia advertise PrEP and enroll people in those programs, estimates approximately 9,000 HIV infections were averted between 2017 and 2022, saving an estimated $5 billion in lifetime medical costs.
If everyone who needed PrEP drugs could access them, activists say new HIV infections in Atlanta would fall by over 90%, potentially saving Georgia taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, the AJC has reported.
In Georgia, 2,575 people were diagnosed with HIV in 2022, and 60,902 Georgians are living with HIV, according to the DPH. Nationwide, about 1.2 million Americans are living with HIV, and 31,800 acquired the virus in 2022, according to the KFF.
Only Miami and Memphis, Tennessee, outrank Atlanta in terms of new HIV infections, the AJC reported.
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
