COVID-19 Takes it’s Toll on AIDS Patients Also
Anika H. Ahmed, MD
As masked up and almost fully immunized scientists, researchers, doctors, and other medical personnel got together on December 1st to celebrate another WORLD AIDS DAY, they glanced down at the agenda of ‘End Inequalities, End AIDS’ discussion allotted for the 2021 World AIDS Day and could not help reflect on the inequality that the Coronavirus had born on HIV positive people across the globe. Before Coronavirus created havoc in the lives of everyone, many reflected on the injustices, inequalities and the social stigma that was attached to people carrying the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). World AIDS Day is celebrated every year to show support to the people effected by the HIV virus and to work together to find a cure to the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).
However, the top infectious disease experts opened the World AIDS Day celebration of 2021 with the observation that the COVID-19 pandemic has diverted much scientific and financial resources from the fight against AIDS, resulting in serious disruption of all global efforts to achieve the United Nation’s goal of eradicating AIDS by 2030. The United Nations General Assembly was informed this year that the pandemic of COVID-19 has disrupted and interrupted the supply chains and resulted in increased risk for the HIV positive population across the globe, to be infected with yet another deadly virus namely Coronavirus!
The immunocompromised AIDS population face double the risk compared to the general population. Firstly, their very weak immune system cannot trigger an antibody defense response to the Coronavirus if and when exposed and secondly the suctioning out of all financial resources for research, primary prevention, education, medication, secondary prevention of complications and tertiary management of terminal cases of AIDS patients have pulled them back over decades of progress made. They are now moving in reverse direction with little progress in research, management and prevention of HIV/AIDS.
To confront these challenges, there is an urgent need to have collaborative research efforts and channel supply chains to assure that people with HIV everywhere have a quick and early access to effective COVID-19 vaccination along side of having an uninterrupted supply of anti-HIV medicines. It still remains a harsh reality that as a global society, there still remains long-standing inequities in health care access, in some countries and these must be overcome with good collaboration of financial and scientific support. Worth noting here is that decades of research on HIV helped in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic as for example singling out messenger RNA vaccines and the pool of substances that are effective in vaccines. mRNA vaccines work by using a piece of genetic code from the spike protein of the coronavirus and that piece of genetic code trains the immune system to generate a response. Both the Pfizer-BionTech and the Moderna vaccines rely on mRNA.
UNAIDS, the U.N. agency leading the global effort to end the AIDS pandemic, has issued a report stating that new HIV infections are not falling fast enough across the world to stop the pandemic, with 1.5 million new HIV infections in 2020. It warned that the world could face 7.7 million AIDS-related deaths over the next 10 years if leaders do not focus on the inequalities in the availability of drugs and treatment. COVID-19 has also cut down on HIV testing and that by itself can give rise to another pandemic, this time named HIV!