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PrEP’s promise to change the course of HIV has succeeded — but only for white gay men

PrEP's promise to change the course of HIV has succeeded — but only for white gay men

A decade into the era of the HIV prevention pill, called PrEP, efforts to leverage its heralded power to curb new infections have stagnated in the United States.

This shortfall is a key reason the nation lags far behind many others in combating HIV, with a national epidemic long plagued by racial inequities and only a modestly declining new infection rate. 

“We are reaching a scientific crisis in HIV prevention,” LaRon Nelson, an associate professor of nursing and public health at Yale University, said last month at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle. Nelson lamented the gulf between PrEP’s impressive performance in major studies and its moderate real-world impact.

On the bright side, PrEP, which is short for pre-exposure prophylaxis and involves taking either oral or injectable prescription antiretroviral medications in advance of potential HIV exposure, has indeed achieved substantial popularity — but only among white gay and bisexual men, who have long seen a dropping HIV rate.

Such inequity persists despite the efforts of a nationwide public-health army and countless millions of dollars spent promoting and facilitating PrEP use among Black and Latino gay and bi men. Of all major intersectional demographics, these groups contract HIV at the highest rates, and transmissions among them have flatlined or barely declined in recent years.

And so, even amid the national reckoning over racial inequity, PrEP has only served to widen HIV-transmission racial disparities among men who have sex with men. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gay and bi men account for 70% of new cases of the virus. Whites in this demographic comprised 15% of the 34,800 HIV transmissions in 2019, while the much smaller populations of their Black and Latino peers comprised a respective 26% and 23% of new cases. 

Additionally, more than a year after the approval of a long-acting injectable form of PrEP, ViiV Healthcare’s Apretude, few are receiving it. Insurers have mostly refused to cover the expensive drug. Consequently, even after clinical trials found injectable PrEP was dramatically superior to oral PrEP at preventing HIV on a public health level, especially among Black gay men, Apretude’s potential will likely remain untapped for the foreseeable future.

Troubling statistics

Gilead Sciences’ two-drug combo pill Truvada was approved as PrEP in 2012 and was followed in 2019 by a similar drug, Descovy. When…

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