Twitter moments reports that Trump said that the US government is going to deal with the AIDS epidemic in the USA, and cure childhood cancer.

Most of the comments in the Twitter moment, along with highly popular tweets when searching Twitter about the topic, suggested that it was a nonsensical or untrue statement without any detail.

However, doing a quick google search indicates that he talked about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the State of the Union 2019.

Has the US government described plans to deal with HIV/AIDS in the US and/or childhood cancer, either prior to or subsequent to his campaign rally remarks, and are they new initiatives compared to previous administrations?

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    Should this be migrated to Skeptics SE? – wha7ever Aug 2 '19 at 16:46


Trump Administration Secures Historic Donation of Billions of Dollars in HIV Prevention Drugs.

The agreement between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Gilead will last until at least December 31, 2025 and possibly through December 31, 2030, and will provide medication to treat individuals who are at risk for HIV and who are uninsured. This donation will deliver Gilead’s PrEP medication Truvada, which currently carries a list price of more than $20,000 per patient per year, to up to 200,000 people per year, including in the states and counties identified as priority areas in the Trump Administration plan to end the HIV epidemic in America.

The basic concept here seems to be that if insurance covers some of the at-risk population and this program covers the rest, that this would greatly reduce HIV infections. The elimination argument would seem to be based on the same herd immunity as vaccines. In other words, if the infection rate drops precipitously (due to the drugs), there will be fewer people who are undiagnosed but infectious. That in turn will cause the infection rate to drop more.

This is a new program this year, not a holdover from previous administrations. I don't know if this replaced a previous program.


This isn't the first time that he's mentioned cancer. He also did so in June.

“We will come up with the cures to many, many problems, to many, many diseases — including cancer and others — and we're getting closer all the time."

Trump also made a campaign promise of eradicating AIDS “once and for all,” adding that "we’re very close.”

In February, he proposed an additional $500 million over ten years. That's specifically for childhood/pediatric cancers. That source doesn't explain how much is currently spent specifically on pediatric cancer research, but it does mention that almost $6 billion per year is spent on the National Cancer Institute overall. So almost a 1% increase in overall spending and presumably a larger share of pediatric spending.

This would be new spending in addition to what was already budgeted. It's not obvious that there is a new program or treatment involved.

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    Would it be safe to say TL;DR AIDS yes cancer no? – Jared Smith Aug 3 '19 at 2:45

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