Letters to the editor

SF needs to backfill any federal HIV cuts
 
This Juneteenth, I will be celebrating my 62nd birthday – a milestone that, for the longest time, felt like an impossible dream. You see, I was told at the age of 25 I would be lucky to live to see 30. To have lived through the early days of the HIV epidemic was to exist with a death sentence hanging over your head. I watched, helpless, as so many of my dearest friends were stolen by this relentless virus. The grief from those years, the sheer weight of so much loss, piled up, becoming an almost unbearable burden.
 
Even as medical breakthroughs began to offer a glimmer of a future, a chance to live, they couldn't magically erase the scars left by decades of accumulated sorrow. It was only when I found my way to one-on-one therapy, a lifeline extended to me by a local HIV service organization, that I truly began to unpack that mountain of grief. That support was my path to healing, to confronting the shadows of the past and stepping into the light of the present.
 
Mayor Daniel Lurie, I remember your words during your campaign. You made a clear and solemn promise: to backfill every single dollar of federal cuts to our local HIV care and prevention network. This network isn't just an abstract collection of programs; it's the very bedrock of survival and hope for so many in San Francisco. It's the intricate system of care, support, and prevention that has enabled us to achieve something truly remarkable – driving new HIV transmissions down to below 100 a year. This is a monumental public health achievement, a testament to what dedicated, properly funded services can accomplish.
 
Now, this very network, these life-saving programs, are facing the terrifying prospect of devastating cuts. To even consider dismantling programs that have unequivocally proved their effectiveness, programs that have literally saved lives and prevented untold suffering, is not only a bafflingly illogical move, it is morally indefensible. It would represent a catastrophic leap backward, carelessly undoing decades of hard-won progress, progress paid for with advocacy, research, and, yes, human lives.
 
Mayor Lurie, you gave your word. We, the community that relies on these services, the community that has fought so hard to get to this point, are asking you to keep it. Fully backfill any and all federal cuts to San Francisco’s world-acclaimed HIV prevention and care network. The alternative is unthinkable, because the cost of failing to do so isn't measured in dollars and cents, but in human lives.
 
If San Francisco and its leaders fail to implement every strategy and tactic at their disposal to mitigate these cuts proposed by the Trump administration, then I fear this city will experience another HIV epidemic the likes of which we haven't seen since the early 1980s. Worse, in fact, because what will develop are medication resistant and superstrains of the HIV virus that our public health system will not be able to combat. Especially with cuts to medical and scientific research. A budget is a moral document which speaks directly to how a government cares for and regards its citizenry. I haven't been fighting this battle since I was eighteen years old in order to watch young people of today walk through the kind of devastation that I was forced to when I was their age. I carry the guilt of surviving with my friends who have it for the last 43 years, knowing that further devastation of entire communities could be prevented and wasn't … well I wouldn't want that on my conscience, do you?
 
Paul Aguilar
Long-term survivor Community Liaison
San Francisco AIDS Foundation