HIV response facing ‘biggest storm ever seen’, new UN report into global aid cuts warns

HIV response facing ‘biggest storm ever seen’, new UN report into global aid cuts warns After unprecedented funding cuts, the AIDS-related death toll in 2025 was more than double the global target which had been set to end the pandemic - Bookmark - CommentsGo to comments The world is at a perilous moment as unprecedented aid cuts have caused the "biggest storm the HIV response has ever seen", the United Nations has warned in one of the first major reports to quantify the impact of funding shortfalls. Winnie Byanyima, head of the UN agency for HIV/AIDS, told The Independent that decades of progress had been undone. HIV infections among women and girls in Sub-Saharan Africa remain on the rise, while the AIDS-related death toll in 2025 was more than double global targets needed to end the pandemic. This is all due to the sharpest drop in global development assistance on record, with funding from multiple countries falling by 23 per cent last year, hitting HIV programmes severely. Byanyima implored governments around the world to stay united and pool resources to continue to fight the global health threat and meet the goal of ending AIDS by 2030. “There's no question that this is the most serious disruption in the HIV response since the world came together to fight this disease,” she said. “The funding cuts, combined with the reduction in civic space and the further criminalisation of marginalised populations have come together to create the biggest storm the HIV response has ever seen.” She added that this meant we are beginning to see the reversal of some of the gains we had made and “progress in the HIV response is in peril.” "We just need to keep the global solidarity, everybody in the fight, putting their best foot forward with resources, science and rights. "It's just politics that's stopping us. We can end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030." Within hours of becoming president, Donald Trump froze the majority of US aid abroad and eventually cancelled 80 per cent of his country’s foreign aid projects worldwide. This decimated funding to PEPFAR, the US's global HIV response programme and one of the most successful health initiatives in history. The UK and Europe followed suit, with Sir Keir Starmer announcing this year that Britain would redirect foreign aid spending towards defence. While infections and the death toll globally have fallen since 2010, initial data gathered in a report launched on Friday show alarming numbers of new infections, particularly among women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa, where there are 3,000 new infections a week. New infections are also surging in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia. Part of this is caused by interruptions to life-sustaining antiretroviral treatment, as well as prevention programmes, which in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa were almost entirely funded by the external aid that has now been lost. The uptake of PrEP (daily medicine to prevent HIV) sunk by nearly 40 per cent between 2024 and 2025 in 62 countries reporting to UNAIDS. Meanwhile, funding for condoms has been cut by more than 90 per cent in some cases. This has been coupled with a sudden dearth of testing, which has fallen by nearly a quarter in high-burden settings because of funding shortfalls, meaning "we are not capturing the full story", Byanyima added. She warned the real number of infections was likely higher. This was also true of the death toll. In 2025 there were at least 570,000 registered AIDS-related deaths, more than double the original target for 2025 in the effort to end the pandemic. This is happening amid what Byanyima described as a "window of opportunity" created by new prevention tools, such as Lenacapavir, a long-lasting injectable prevention therapy that has been called a miracle drug and the closest thing to a vaccine. But amid the funding cuts, even that has not been properly rolled out. "Our goal is to reach 20 million people with long-acting prevention,” Byanymina said. “However, what is currently available and starting to roll out has a target of reaching two million people. That's a far cry from where we want to be and where we know we can start to bend the curve,” she added. She highlighted the plight of the most vulnerable marginalised populations, including members of the LGBT+ community, sex workers and intravenous drug users, who live in countries where they are criminalised. They relied almost entirely on foreign-funded clinics, which have had to close. The Independent recently travelled to Nigeria and met gay men and transgender women who were in hiding from a surge in violence amid the closure of the safe testing spaces and clinics they depended on. Same-sex relations are illegal in Nigeria. Several members of the community were off their life-sustaining medication, or borrowing medicine from friends as they feared arrest if they went to government clinics. “The world should not leave us behind. We’re dying,” implored one transgender sex worker living with HIV, who was speaking to The Independent from a safe house in Lagos and borrowing medication. Since the world came together to fight the pandemic, at least 32 million lives had been saved through access to life-saving treatment, "in spite of having no cure and no vaccine”, Byanyima said. That was now being reversed. "If we don't [act], this epidemic is going to surge again. We're going to see new infections rising. We will see deaths again, when our younger generation don't even know AIDS because they don't see the deaths any more," she said. This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project Join our commenting forum Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies Comments