'Pandemic-ending' HIV jab at risk over Trump's aid cuts

The funding for 2 million people to receive the treatment is 'receding in the chaos' of the US president's decision, the doctor behind the trial of the drug tells Rachel Schraer

- Rachel Schraer

Professor Linda-Gail Bekker recalls having "shivers" when she found out that not one single woman given a revolutionary new jab in her medical trial had caught HIV. She told a global Aids summit last year that she "literally burst into tears". Now, she tells The Independent, that emotion has turned into an "acute sense of despair".

The funding to get lenacapavir - a twice-yearly preventative jab that has been described as the nearest thing we have to an HIV vaccine - out to at least 2 million people around the globe is in question thanks to the turmoil accompanying Donald Trump's decision to slash US aid spending.

Lenacapavir stops HIV from replicating, meaning that as long as someone is on the drug, they are almost totally protected from developing the virus if they are exposed to it. Prof Bekker's study found a 96 per cent reduction in HIV overall - but in the arm of the trial looking at women and adolescent girls, there were no infections at all.

In December, global funders, led by the US President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, promised to secure enough doses of the jab to protect at least two million people over three years.

Its manufacturer, Gilead, says it will sell these at no profit, though it has not made the cost of a dose public. Gilead has also signed agreements with six pharmaceutical companies in India, Pakistan, Egypt, and the US to allow them to make generic versions of the drug in order to increase supply and drive down the cost of the jab.