If you took Democrats and left-wing activists at their word, you’d think President Trump was intentionally sabotaging HIV research. The gay issue website Queerty described the Trump administration’s recent decision to end experimentation on the remains of aborted babies as “an attack on the queer community.”
Meanwhile, elected Democrats such as Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut blasted Trump’s supposedly “radical” decision and “hostility to science.” Not to be outdone, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., called the efforts “cruel, shameless, and wrong.”
Yet, as is often the case with Democratic cries of homophobia, there’s smoke but no fire. Yes, Trump’s decision may negatively impact some medical research, but this is an issue of complex medical ethics that cannot just be dismissed. And the Trump administration has worked to fight to eradicate HIV, proving that the president, despite his flaws, does care about the health and well-being of all Americans, including gays and all HIV sufferers.
It is true that Trump’s decision will end federal funding for medical research done on fetal tissue and terminate a National Institutes of Health agreement with the University of California, San Francisco, that previously provided fetal issue for HIV research. There is room for reasonable people to disagree on the wisdom of the decision, but it’s absurd to act as if it’s entirely baseless.
Experimentation on aborted babies poses a complex moral question. Medical research done on the tissue of deceased adults, for instance, requires the legal consent of the deceased — something that aborted babies certainly cannot provide. And there’s a perversity to the idea that we, as Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser put it, “have been complicit, through our taxpayer dollars, in the experimentation using baby body parts.”
So taking steps to end this practice doesn’t mean that Trump does not care about HIV research. A fair reading of his record reveals the opposite.
Just a few weeks ago, the president secured a massive donation of the HIV prevention medication PrEP. After the administration’s lobbying, manufacturer Gilead will now donate the medication to 200,000 people a year through 2025, amounting to billions in free healthcare for those at greatest risk of HIV. The drug has a 97% rate of effectiveness at preventing the contraction of HIV, so with this massive achievement, Trump just potentially saved thousands of gay men’s lives, among others.
Yet this isn’t the only effort he’s made. Trump vowed in his most recent State of the Union address to end HIV transmission within 10 years and substantiated his pledge with the launch of new federal initiatives. Beyond that, Trump’s most recent budget request included $291 million for domestic HIV prevention and treatment efforts.
All in all, the president has made ending HIV a cornerstone of his healthcare platform. Critics who seize on one isolated action to paint him as a saboteur are putting their political agenda over a crucial cause we should all care about.
