At AIDS 2026, activists disrupt session led by PEPFAR official

.AIDS 2026 | Rio de Janeiro.

At AIDS 2026, activists from Health GAP, Treatment Action Campaign and Housing Works disrupted a pre-conference meeting, decrying “turmoil” caused not only by PEPFAR cuts, but by a variety of actions taken by the Trump administration. The activists interrupted speaker Jeff Graham, acting U.S. global AIDS coordinator responsible for PEPFAR and the head of the U.S. delegation to the conference.

“We will not be erased!” shouted Asia Russell, executive director and founder of Health GAP, directly addressing Graham and other speakers. “PEPFAR’s own data show the deadly harms of this approach. Your own data show it—although you have repressed it.”

Activists chanted, “You lie, people die; restore our PEPFAR now!”

“This was a third-party pre-conference session organized independently by external partners, so IAS was not responsible for the session or what was said. Because of that, we do not have a comment to offer,” said the International AIDS Society (IAS), organizer of AIDS 2026, in an email to Positively Aware. “More broadly, IAS has a long story of accepting protests at our conferences, and we welcome advocacy.”

The session that was protested was organized by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy (GHSD). Launched in August 2023, GHSD is responsible for leading U.S. diplomatic efforts and foreign assistance coordination to prevent, detect and respond to infectious disease threats—including HIV/AIDS through PEPFAR—and integrating global health security into national security.

The bureau has been significantly reshaped under the Trump administration, freezing foreign aid, absorbing the remaining global health functions from the dissolved U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and executing an “America First Global Health Strategy” that shifts away from traditional multilateral approaches in favor of bilateral government-to-government agreements.

The U.S. had already drawn criticism ahead of AIDS 2026, in the form of an open letter to the Trump administration from more than 100 community organizations, denouncing the America First Global Health Strategy and platforming a U.S. representative in the pre-conference program.

“The three sessions are structured as institutional presentations of bilateral agreements, implementation plans, financing and governance,” the letter states, criticizing IAS for not sharing the consequences of recent U.S. policies. “Our concern is not whether a government has the right to explain its policies. It is whether the IAS should grant those policies the visibility, credibility and institutional legitimacy of the world’s leading HIV conference. The fact that externally organized pre-conferences may be purchased explains how an event enters the programme; it does not answer why the IAS considers it compatible with its mission and values.”

Health GAP’s statement rebuking the Trump administration read in part, “In sharp contrast to transparent and data-driven PEPFAR programming during prior Republican and Democratic administrations, Trump’s [memorandums of understanding, MOUs] have been marked by secret negotiations, sharp funding cuts, refusal to meaningfully engage independent civil society, and onerous and corrupt conditionalities, such as threatening to withhold HIV funding unless non-health related policy demands such as U.S. access to mineral wealth were granted. As a result, MOUs are stalled or stopped in Ghana, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Zambia, comprising one-third of people living with HIV worldwide. Zambia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mulambo Haimbe, has publicly rebuked the approach. By concentrating power between governments that often reject the human rights of people most affected by HIV, and removing independent, data-driven monitoring, activists point out that Trump’s approach forecloses PEPFAR’s ability to rapidly identify and address program failure in partnership with countries, a crucial factor in PEPFAR’s decades of impact.”