Week of Dec. 4, 2025

From the editor’s desk

Monday, Dec. 1, was World Aids Day—but not in the United States. NPR explained: 

It’s the first time the U.S. has not participated since the World Health Organization created this day in 1988 to remember the millions of people who have died of AIDS-related illnesses and recommit to fighting the epidemic that still claims the lives of more than half a million people each year.

Why did the U.S. not participate? According to NPR, “The State Department issued a terse statement last week saying, ‘an awareness day is not a strategy.’”

OK, so what is the strategy? To dismantle and defund, to roll back as much progress as possible, it appears.

PBS reported on Monday:

The administration slashed funding for global HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment projects earlier this year and moved to eliminate many domestic initiatives as well.

In part, because of those steep cuts, the U.N. now estimates global funding for HIV has dropped 40 percent in two years, and public health leaders argue decades of progress are at risk.

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with PBS about what that looks like from inside the health-care policy world:

“What we’re going to see is more babies being born with HIV globally and potentially even domestically, more people dying of HIV. I haven’t seen an AIDS ward like I did in the late ’90s and 2000s for decades. And I fear that that’s going to come back when we don’t have the right infrastructure to support the work necessary.”

As if the official snub to AIDS victims, researchers, policymakers and health-care providers wasn’t enough, there’s more chilling health news this week. According to a Gates Foundation report, the number of children worldwide who are expected to die before they reach the age of 5 is now expected to rise, for the first time this century. Fortune contextualized the news this way:

This alarming forecast comes amid sharp declines in global development assistance for health, which fell 26.9% below 2024 levels this year. In the U.S. the Trump administration has dismantled its aid agency, USAID, and drastically cut foreign aid.

Bill Gates wrote in the report, “The death of a child is always a tragedy. But there’s something especially devastating about a child dying of a disease we know how to prevent.”

So, yes, we can add worldwide epidemics like AIDS and childhood mortality to the list of things we collectively know how to address productively—but won’t. It is mind-boggling to attempt to imagine how long it will take to undo all of this damage.

Take care,

—Kris Vagner, managing editor