This Is How an AIDS Crisis Starts: Politics, ADAP Cuts, and the Cost of Forgetting History

ByCharles SanchezJanuary 27, 2026Current news stories regarding HIV are bleak. The Trump administration has made major cuts to HIV/AIDS funding internationally and domestically, including education and prevention campaigns, care for those living with the virus, and scientific study for new treatments and possible cures. Cuts to Medicaid threaten approximately 480,000 Americans living with HIV. And last month, the White House seemed proud to decline marking World AIDS Day in 2025, putting out a statement that “Awareness is not a strategy” – while not providing any HIV prevention and care strategy. Perhaps it’s all part of the illusive “concepts of a plan” for health care that Trump teased in his campaign. What amazes me is the lack of outrage and fear about HIV/AIDS among the general public. Is AIDS no longer in the public consciousness? Does no one care anymore? Or have we as an HIV community done such a good job of showing folks that HIV is a manageable condition that the average American thinks living with it is no big deal? In the past 10 years, there have been many campaigns to prove a person with HIV can live a long, healthy life if you follow a medical professional’s care and take your antiretroviral meds as prescribed. The entire U=U (Undetectable Equals Untransmittable) movement, explaining that someone living with HIV on successful treatment can’t transmit the virus sexually, has had worldwide success. The advancement of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) as a prevention tool is downright miraculous, giving you a simple way to keep from acquiring HIV. Many health and community organizations have altered their names across the years, taking out the word AIDS and replacing it with HIV, in order to soften the message. For example, the government’s own site was originally called AIDS.gov but was changed to HIV.gov in 2017. The National Minority AIDS Council is now only the letters NMAC. Some may not realize the A once stood for AIDS. Even the United States Conference on AIDS (USCA) changed its name to the United States Conference on HIV (USCH), and only added AIDS back in (USCHA) after community backlash from long-term survivors . And even me. About 10 years ago, the first season of a web series I created (along with my producing partner Tyne Firmin) premiered. Merce is a musical comedy about a gay man in New York City living with HIV. The point of the show is to change people’s outdated ideas of what someone living with HIV looks like – that having HIV is no longer an automatic death sentence. Merce was downright revolutionary, showing someone living with HIV that wasn’t sad, sick, or dying. The tagline was even, “Life can be positive when you’re positive!”All of this wasn’t only to ease the burden of the stigma of the word AIDS for those of us living with the virus, but to help change societal perceptions. Where AIDS in the media used to be scary and doom-filled, now commercials for HIV medications are on national television, showing healthy, non-AIDSy looking people at sunny picnics and fun runs. Those are the complete opposite of images from the early days of the AIDS crisis, when news stories showed frighteningly sick people emaciated and covered with Kaposi sarcoma lesions. It’s amazing progress. Science has helped us stay alive, and society has turned a more compassionate eye to those of us in the HIV community. Or has it?The state of Florida has just announced that, as of March 1, 2026, the eligibility for ADAP (AIDS Drug Assistance Program), which helps low-income folks with HIV receive their medication, will be much different. The eligibility is changing from a person living with HIV earning 400% of the federal poverty level (which is $15,960 for a single person annually, according to healthcare.gov) to a threshold of only 130%, kicking more than 15,000 people off ADAP. That puts people at risk of sickness and death. All of them can potentially transmit the virus when their own viral load becomes detectable. Florida is the test state. If lowering the ADAP threshold goes through without a hitch in the Sunshine State, Texas is sure to follow, then the entire Bible Belt. Those states already have higher rates of new HIV transmissions. Then this administration can claim the majority of states think this is good policy, and make it a national plan to kick low-income folks off of a drug assistance program that keeps them alive. This can create another AIDS crisis in the U.S. Is this new policy partly our community’s fault? In our efforts to show it’s no longer the 1980s or 1990s, and that life with HIV can be healthy and fabulous, have we made it seem like HIV is no big deal? Did the erasure of the word AIDS in so many of our organizations and policies make people forget what AIDS can do if unchecked? Have people forgotten the misery of the sickness and the death that ravaged our communities?Of course, the president and all his MAGA minions are truly to blame. But now it’s on us, as an HIV community, to remind the country that people living with HIV can easily become people dead from AIDS. We have to remind them that while HIV isn’t an automatic death sentence, without medications (if ADAP policies cut folks off), thousands of Americans will die. We need to remind them AIDS doesn’t discriminate. During the AIDS crisis of the ’80s and ’90s, there were many conservative folks who claimed it was killing off “all the right people,” meaning queer folks, black and brown folks, trans folks, sex workers, and drug addicts. Maybe modern MAGA conservatives would consider my death from AIDS an acceptable consequence. After all, I’m queer, I’m brown, I’m poor, and a drug addict (in recovery, but still). Perhaps another AIDS crisis would, in Trump supporters’ eyes, Make America Great Again. Photo Credit: Moment Open / Getty ImagesConnect with other people living with HIV reactionsTell us what you think of this post?0Like0Cheered up0Empowered 0CareDisclaimer