The Garcia representative asks RFK Jr. to explain the targeting of HIV / AIDS financing

Representative Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) calls the secretary of health and social services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In a letter to Kennedy dated Thursday, Garcia said that the cabinet’s secretary had a hitch from disinformation of hawking on the virus and the disease, and that the planned cuts – which he called “alarming and unprecedented” – would cost lives.

“We fear that your motivations to disrupt the financing of HIV and delay preventive services and research will not be founded in solid sciences, but in the disinformation and disinformation that you have already spread to HIV and AIDS, including your repeated assertion that HIV does not cause AIDS,” wrote Garcia, the Democrat of the Chamber Surveillance Committee.

A health and social services spokesman said Kennedy remains attached to the public sciences of science, that Critical HIV / AIDS programs will continue under his direction and that the investments in progress in such work demonstrate this commitment.

President Trump and Kennedy previously defended the radical discounts of health and social services and staff programs under the direction of Kennedy. The agency spokesperson said that they would allow Kennedy’s priorities to be focused more on “ending the chronic disease epidemic by focusing on safe and healthy food, clean water and the elimination of environmental toxins.”

Kennedy said that the department under his watch “will be more – much more – at a lower cost for the taxpayer.”

Garcia’s letter-which he co-written with the representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-ill.), The classification democrat on the subcommittee of health and financial services-asked that the health service produces a list of all financing purposes linked to HIV / AIDS, as well as other documents and communications around several cuts.

The letter is the last attempt of the Democrats, in coordination with health experts and LGBTQ +organizations, to challenge what they consider as an inexplicable but coordinated effort of the Trump administration to dismantle public health initiatives aimed at controlling and ultimately put an end to one of the most devastating and fatal epidemics in the history of man.

It happens the same day that the Senate Republicans agreed with a Trump administration request to recover billions of dollars in funding for public media and foreign aid, but refused a previous request from the White House to include in the cuts of around $ 400 million in HIV / AIDS funding for the safeguard of the president’s emergency plan for AIDS, or PEPFAR, in some of the poorest nations in the world.

The room had previously voted for a previous version of the measure which reduced the funding of the PEPFAR, which was launched by President George W. Bush in 2003. However, the senators put pressure for the restoration of the financing before accepting the wider termination package.

The room must now approve the version of the Senate by the measure by Friday to take effect.

In an interview with The Times, Garcia said he has long considered Kennedy as a dangerous “conspiracy theorist” who “peddled in all kinds of lies” on HIV, vaccines and other medical sciences. Now that Kennedy is secretary of health, he said, the American people deserves to know if national and international health decisions are motivated by their baseless personal convictions.

“People must understand what he is trying to do, and I think he must be responsible and be held responsible for his actions,” said Garcia.

In their letter, Garcia and Krishnamoorthhi have noted that recent scientific progress – including the creation of new preventive drugs – make HIV eradication more feasible than ever. And yet, Kennedy and the Trump administration push the nation and the world in the opposite direction, they said.

“Since its entry into office, the Trump administration has systematically attacked the funding linked to HIV and blocked Critical Services related to HIV and care for those who need it,” wrote Garcia and Krishnamoorthhi. “These disturbances would threaten the most at risk of contracting HIV, and many people living with HIV will become more sick or will infect others without programs on which they count for treatment.”

The letter describes a number of examples of these cuts, in particular:

• The elimination of the HIV prevention division of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Stradiation or the delay of billions of dollars in HIV prevention subsidies from this office.
• The termination of a program of $ 258 million in the National Institutes of Health to find a vaccine to prevent new HIV infections.
• The termination of dozens of NIH subsidies for HIV research, in particular around the prevention of new infections in black and Latino homosexuals which are disproportionately risk contracting the virus.
• The targeting of HIV prevention initiatives abroad, including PEPFAR.
• The United States recovering from the Global Fund to combat AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Many members of the medical and foreigners community have expressed serious concerns about Kennedy named Secretary of Health, partly due to his past remarks on HIV / AIDS. Kennedy told a journalist from the New York Magazine as recently as in June 2023 that there were “much better candidates than HIV for AIDS”.

In their letter, Garcia and Krishnamoorthhi called a specific theory shared by Kennedy that the recreational drug called “poppers” can cause AIDS, rather than the HIV virus, “we are deeply concerned about the fact that Trump administration is liable to the interest of HIV in public health”.

Kennedy’s skepticism about the link between HIV and AIDS is confronted with conflicts with well -established sciences which have long been accepted by the medical establishment and the federal government. Studies in the world have proven the link and have found that HIV is the only common factor in the case of AIDS.

In August 2023, about a week before Kennedy launched his support for Trump, his presidential campaign approached the controversy surrounding his commentary on “poppers”, declaring that Kennedy did not think that poppers were “the only cause” of AIDS, but argued that they were “an important factor in the progression of the disease” of the first patients in the 1980s.

Garcia and Krishnamoorthhi also noted a successful effort by local officials and defenders of the County of Los Angeles to obtain around 20 million dollars in HIV / AIDS financing last month, after similar funding at the national level was frozen by the Trump administration.

The restoration of these funds followed another letter sent to Kennedy by the representative Laura Friedman (D-Glendale) and other members of the Chamber, who cited estimates of the AIDS Research Foundation, known as AMFAR, that the national cuts could lead to 127,000 additional deaths caused by AIDS causes in five years.

Garcia and Krishnamoorthhi cited the same statistics in their letter.

In his interview with The Times, Garcia, who is gay, also said that the LGBTQ + community “is rightly indigent” by Kennedy’s actions to date and deserves to know if Kennedy “uses his own conspiracy theories and his own distorted vision of facts” to dismantle.