Dr. Jerome Adams, who served as U.S. surgeon general under former President Donald Trump, criticized a decision from a judge in Texas on Wednesday who ruled that requiring companies to provide HIV prevention care violates employers' religious rights.
U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor ruled that private health insurance plans don't have to cover HIV preventative drugs under the Affordable Care Act, more than two years after a company, Braidwood Management Inc., filed suit and alleged that the mandate violated its religious freedoms.
"What religion believes in allowing people to get a preventable infectious disease, and what employer thinks it's fiscally prudent to allow employees to contract a disease which will cost them $1/2- 1 million?" Adams tweeted on Wednesday evening.
During the last (Trump) administration, it was federal policy to support both PrEP and SSPs as part of the ending the HIV epidemic effort.
— Jerome Adams (@JeromeAdamsMD) September 7, 2022
Because prevention of HIV is both morally and fiscally the right thing to do.
Adams linked to a study from the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association, which found that the average lifetime medical cost for a person with HIV ranges from around $420,000 to just over $1 million.
"I'm not even being facetious here—how is telling employers they don't have to pay for PrEP to prevent HIV any different than telling them they don't have to pay for cholesterol meds to prevent heart attacks? Isn't gluttony (which can lead to heart disease) a sin?" Adams continued.
Adams noted that during the Trump administration, "it was federal policy to support both PrEP and SSPs as part of the ending the HIV epidemic effort."
"Because prevention of HIV is both morally and fiscally the right thing to do," Adams wrote.
In an email to Newsweek on Thursday, Adams said that he "saw firsthand the damage an HIV outbreak can do to a community—and its businesses—during our 2015 outbreak in Scott County, Indiana."
In 2014 and 2015, Scott County, Indiana was the site of an "explosive outbreak" of HIV "among people who inject drugs" according to the medical journal The Lancet. The journal said that in total, 215 HIV infections were "eventually attributed to the outbreak."
"Efforts to prevent such an outbreak—including PrEP—are both the morally and fiscally responsible thing to do," Adams continued in the email. "Further, it's bigoted and just plain wrong to believe that only people behaving 'immorally' can contract HIV. I've visited Ryan White's school and his gravesite—and it's a shame that over 30 years after his death we still have to remind folks that HIV can impact all of us," Adams added.
Ryan White was a 13-year-old who was diagnosed with AIDS after he received a blood transfusion in 1984, and who "faced AIDS-related discrimination in his Indiana community," according to the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).
"Along with his mother Jeanne White Ginder, he rallied for his right to attend school. He gained national attention and became the face of public education about the disease," HRSA's Ryan White HIV/AIDS program says on its website.
White died in 1990, just before he would have graduated from high school.
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Xander Landen is a Newsweek weekend reporter. His focus is often U.S. politics, but he frequently covers other issues including ... Read more
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