Ten years ago, hundreds of organizations and individuals signed a petition calling on all presidential candidates to create a national AIDS strategy. We knew the approach to HIV in the U.S. had to change. If you read about AIDS in the paper, then it was likely about the horrifying scale of the global epidemic; the epidemic at home had largely become invisible. The national HIV response we saw was a patchwork: uncoordinated, without clear goals, underinvested where the challenge was most acute, with interventions delivered well below the scale necessary for impact. And the science of HIV prevention was changing dramatically without sufficient efforts to put it into practice.
By the end of 2007, most presidential candidates, including John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, had accepted the challenge to create a strategy. In June 2010, President Obama issued the first comprehensive National HIV/AIDS Strategy for the United States.
Five Things We Learned From Implementation of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy
1) A commitment to being strategic provides political cover to do tough things.
The Strategy itself was full of smart analysis of the epidemic and laudable goals, but its real impact came in how it was used. With strong leadership by Jeff Crowley, head of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP), and his deputy Greg Millett, a series of epidemiologically necessary but politically challenging policy innovations were undertaken, each justified by the new Strategy.