Top SA scientist joins call for Pepfar to be reauthorised without restrictions
Salim Abdool Karim says ‘the Covid-19 pandemic showed how the world is interconnected and that no country would be spared a resurgent HIV epidemic’
One of SA’s foremost HIV/Aids researchers, Salim Abdool Karim, has joined internationally renowned scientists in urging the US Congress to reauthorise the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) with no strings attached, saying compromising the decades-long Aids relief programme would reverse hard-won gains against the disease.
Pepfar has historically had bipartisan support, but this year several Republican politicians delayed its next five-year term by demanding reauthorisation be linked to new abortion-related restrictions. These legislators want to impose a prohibition on Pepfar providing funds to organisations that provide or make referrals to abortion services, or give information about termination of pregnancy, even if they use funding from other sources to do so...
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