UNAids chief 'shaken and disgusted' by US cuts that will mean millions more deaths

Source: The Guardian

Fri 4 Jul 2025 01.00 EDT
Last modified on Fri 4 Jul 2025 04.52 EDT


The head of the global agency tackling Aids says she expects HIV rates to soar and deaths to multiply in the next four years as a direct impact of the “seismic” US cuts to aid spending.

Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of UNAids, said that if the funding permanently disappeared, the world faced an additional 6 million HIV infections and 4 million Aids-related deaths by 2029.

“It is a deadly funding crisis, a global response knocked totally off course. This is a pandemic, and pandemics have no borders,” she said in an interview with the Guardian at the UN international development funding summit this week in Seville, Spain.

Byanyima, a Ugandan aeronautical engineer and politician who has led UNAids since 2019, said seeing the impact of Donald Trump’s cuts had been the worst experience of her life.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jul/04/us-aid-cuts-kill-millions-unaids-head-winnie-byanyima