The nepo baby in charge of America's healthcare ascribes to homophobic conspiracy theories about the origins of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) — and he's purportedly planning to close the office that helps prevent its spread.
According to federal health officials who spoke to CBS News, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr is slated to lay off the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department's entire Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy, as well as its minority health office.
This move comes amid a broader "restructuring" that will, per a recent announcement, eliminate 20,000 positions at the agency. It also comes just a few weeks after the Food and Drug Administration, which is part of HHS, raided a manufacturer of amyl nitrate, the scientific name for the popular — and legal-ish — sex and club inhalant better known as "poppers."
In a statement that circulated on social media, poppers company Double Scorpio announced that it was closing following the raid and said that other manufacturers may also have been impacted. Not long after, RFK Jr.'s past claims about poppers resurfaced, which included his insistence that the inhalant causes AIDS — and not, as per decades-established medical science, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
"The initial signals of AIDS, Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), were both strongly linked to amyl nitrite — 'poppers' — a popular drug among promiscuous gays," the political scion wrote in a book he penned about Anthony Fauci, the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "Other common 'wasting' symptoms were all associated with heavy drug use and lifestyle stressors."
Ironically, president Donald Trump was, during his first administration, seemingly a huge advocate for HIV prevention and research.
In 2019, Trump launched the "Ending the HIV Epidemic" initiative, which made pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medications free for low-income Americans — and made him the first president in American history ever to make HIV and AIDS a federal priority.
When announcing the initiative during his state of the union address that year, Trump boasted that "scientific breakthroughs" funded by his program would help "defeat AIDS in America."
With Trump 2.0, however, it seems that dream has all but died. A few weeks ago, insider sources told the Wall Street Journal that HHS is reducing or eliminating entirely its funding for HIV prevention — including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's free PrEP program.
As The Guardian reported soon after claims of the forthcoming HIV and infectious disease office cuts, the National Institutes of Health, which is also under HHS, terminated at least 145 grants for HIV research worth a cumulative $450 million.
Between these slated HIV prevention rollbacks and the resurgence of AIDS denialism, it's starting to feel a lot like the 1980s and 90s again — an era marred by the loss of nearly half a million people in the United States while their government turned away.
More on the new HHS: Government Hires Crackpot to "Study" Nonexistent Link Between Vaccines and Autism
Share This Article