“We are proud of our results but worried about this sudden interruption, which is erasing the progress made,” the Executive Director of Onusida, Ugandan Winnie Byanyima told AFP before the presentation of the report to Johannesburg.
A particularly affected country
South Africa is one of the countries that have paid the heaviest tribute to AIDS, with a life expectancy that fell at 52 in 2006, before going back, and more than one in ten people living with the virus (12.7%), or 8 million people, according to government figures for 2024.
“We have gone from a situation where people would die every day to a point where (AIDS) is really like a chronic disease,” said Ms. Byanyima.
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Millions of affected lives
So “the question of whether the investment (in prevention and treatments, editor’s note) was worth it, and it continues to be worth it. It saves lives,” she said.
However, with the judgment of the American emergency plan to combat AIDS (PEPFAR), the UNAIDS has made its calculations: this would cause more than six million new contaminations and 4.2 million deaths more than four years. This would bring the pandemic to the levels that the world experienced in the early 2000s.
“time bomb”
“It is not just a lack of money, it is a time bomb,” said in a press release Ms. Byanyima whose country has more AIDS orphans than South Africa (890,000 against 630,000 in 2024, UNUSIDA figures).
More than 60% of women’s associations against AIDS contacted have already lost funds, or suspended from services, according to the report. In Nigeria, for example, the number of people under preventive prophylactic treatment to prevent the transmission of the virus dropped by 85% over the first months of 2025.
A global decline
“The way in which the world has managed to unite (against AIDS) is one of the most important pages of progress in global public health,” said Ms. Byanyima.
“But this fantastic story is strongly undermined” by the “cruel” and “unprecedented” decision of Mr. Trump, she says. “The priorities can change but we do not just withdraw like that a vital support from populations”.
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The emergence of another model
Crucial medical research on prevention and treatments have already been stopped, including in South Africa, a country where the prevalence of AIDS is one of the highest in the world and at the forefront of research. The global fight against AIDS, supported by a field activism, remains “resilient by nature”, wants to hope for the leader.
And in 25 countries with low or medium income out of 60 studied by UNAIDS, governments were able to partially compensate for the shortfall by local funding. “We have to go towards financed responses nationally and specific to each country,” says Ms. Byanyima, calling for debt reductions and a reform of international financial institutions in order to “identify a margin of budgetary maneuver so that developing countries can finance their own response”.
