Chicago, US
Reuters
New infections and deaths from HIV/AIDS may increase as the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted prevention measures, said UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima in an interview airing on Wednesday at the Reuters Next conference.
ON WORLD AIDS DAY, POPE CALLS FOR RENEWED SOLIDARITY WITH VICTIMS
Pope Francis on Wednesday called for a renewed solidarity with those suffering from the HIV virus to guarantee care for those in the world’s poorest places.
Speaking at his general audience, Francis said World AIDS Day was an important occasion to remember people affected by the virus. In some areas of the world there is no access to essential care, he said.
Pope Francis blesses a child after the weekly general audience at the Paul VI Audience Hall, at the Vatican, on 1st December, 2021. PICTURE: REUTERS/Yara Nardi
UNAIDS, the Geneva-based United Nations program on HIV and AIDS, said on Monday that the COVID-19 pandemic was undercutting the AIDS response in many places and services for people who use drugs for HIV were disrupted in 65 per cent of 130 countries surveyed.
“I hope there can be a renewed commitment of solidarity to guarantee efficient and equitable health care [for those with HIV-AIDS],” the Pope said.
The World Health Organization says about 37.7 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2020, more than two thirds of them in Africa.
Last month Francis wrote a letter to Michael O’Loughlin, an American journalist who wrote a book about the work of Catholics who helped AIDS victims at the start of the crisis in the early 1980s.
“Thank you for illuminating the lives and witnessing of the many priests, women religious and lay people who have chosen to accompany, support and help their brothers and sisters suffering from HIV and AIDS at great risk to their profession and reputation,” Francis wrote in the letter.
– PHILIP PULLELLA, Vatican City/Reuters
Byanyima, who is also United Nations under-secretary-general, said that during the first pandemic phase in particular, fewer people opted to be tested and some dropped out of treatment because of long lines at clinics or other public safety measures that impeded access to prevention measures.
“We do expect that in the coming years, we might see more deaths, we might see more new infections as a result of these disruptions,” she said in the pre-recorded interview that aired on World AIDS Day.
Byanyima said vaccine nationalism, in which rich countries buy up vaccine supplies and poor nations are left waiting, has been “among the saddest part of where we are.”
As rich countries have hoarded vaccines, just over seven per cent of Africa’s population has been fully vaccinated, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.
Some scientists believe that might have been a factor in the development of Omicron, the new variant first discovered in southern Africa that has prompted alarm over chances that vaccines might not be effective against it.
“It is no coincidence to most of us that it arose in Sub Saharan Africa, where you have a lot of under-diagnosed HIV infections, or people who are immunocompromised with it,” said John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, in a separate interview.
Moore said people who are immunocompromised cannot clear the infection as quickly as those with healthy immune systems, and that a suboptimal immune response can allow the virus to keep mutating.
“That’s how the other variants are thought to have arisen – in immunocompromised people,” he said.
Byanyima said research shows that people with HIV are no more likely than others to become infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, but that once infected, they are at much higher risk of severe illness.
“That is why for developing countries with a high burden of HIV, this is critical,” she said of the access to COVID-19 vaccines.
