PEPFAR’s Critics, Climate Smart Medicine, Health Care at the RNC

Editors' Note

With the International AIDS Conference in full swing, Emily Bass returns this week to deliver the second installment in her series on how the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) came under political fire. She explains how long-standing critiques of the program's structure and modus operandi have made PEPFAR vulnerable and why President Joe Biden's "position of praising PEPFAR's accomplishments on HIV without substantially leveraging its potential for fighting other pandemics" is no accident.

Staying on the topic of AIDS, Unitaid's Vincent Bretin delivers the results of a new report that shows dolutegravir—the world's leading HIV drug—is 2.6 times less carbon intensive than the treatment it replaced. Its development can serve as a blueprint for climate-smart medicines.

Journalist Jill Langlois then explains how—despite warnings—Brazil's devastating floods in April and May exposed a lack of disaster preparation at all levels of government. Without appropriate urban planning, those tragedies will become more common as climate change shifts weather patterns.

Founder and Executive Director of Lunia Centre for Youths in Zimbabwe Tjedu Moyo continues the conversation on climate change by describing how women are disproportionately affected by extreme weather events that can result in unintended pregnancies, limit women's employment, and contribute to food insecurity.

Next, as some industry representatives decry a "war on alcohol" driven by activist agendas, journalist Ted Alcorn reports on how greater consumer awareness of alcohol's health risks could be behind dwindling sales of beer, wine, and spirits.

Rachael Dziaba and Jordan Schwartz from the Harvard Public Opinion Project close out the week with a roundup of the health-care discussions that took place, and the ones that didn't, at the Republican National Convention.

Until next week!—Nsikan Akpan, Managing Editor, and Caroline Kantis, Associate Editor