Thursday, July 03, 2014

Gov. Cuomo Backs the Other Pill


What a strange world we live in where Larry Kramer is against PrEP, and the governor of New York supports it. Dare we call it progress?

Josh Barro writes:
On Sunday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced an ambitious goal: Ending the AIDS epidemic in New York State by 2020. Governor Cuomo does not mean he expects the state to find a cure; he wants to cut new infections so drastically that the number of New Yorkers living with H.I.V. goes into decline. He has set a goal of 750 new infections in 2020, down from about 3,000 in 2013 and 14,000 at the epidemic’s peak in 1993. To that end, he has embraced a new and controversial treatment for people at risk of contracting H.I.V. He wants to put more H.I.V.-negative people on Truvada, a drug originally developed to treat those who already have the virus, and which the F.D.A. approved in 2012 as protection against new infections. 
When I asked why the governor had made PrEP a key part of his anti-H.I.V. strategy, a top administration official involved in developing the plan who spoke on condition of anonymity gave me a remarkably frank answer. “Some people use condoms, some people don’t,” the official said. “You can’t offer condoms to people who don’t want them.”
Read HERE.

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