News
Biden rounds out team to take on HIV/AIDS domestically, globally
Experts say ‘too soon’ to assess domestic efforts
With the goal of beating HIV by 2025 domestically and a pledge for a renewed effort to fight the disease globally, President Biden has put in place officials charged with making that happen.
The White House kicked off the week with the announcement that John Nkengasong, who has served as a top official on global health at the Centers for Disease Control, would be nominated as ambassador-at-large and coordinator of U.S. government activities to combat HIV/AIDS globally at the State Department.
Meanwhile, leadership within the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, otherwise known as PACHA, was restructured in August as the Biden administration has continued the Ending the HIV Epidemic plan health officials started in the Trump administration.
Carl Schmid, who served as co-chair of PACHA during the Trump years, no longer holds that position, and has been replaced by Marlene McNeese, a woman of color and deputy assistant director of the Houston Health Department. John Wiesman, former secretary of health for Washington State, will continue to serve as co-chair.
McNeese is among eight new members of PACHA. The others are:
- Guillermo Chacón, president of the Latino Commission on AIDS;
- Tori Cooper, director of community engagement for the Transgender Justice Initiative at the Human Rights Campaign;
- Raniyah Copeland, CEO of the Black AIDS Institute;
- Leo Moore, medical director for clinic services at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health;
- Kayla Quimbley, national youth HIV and AIDS Awareness Day ambassador for Advocates for Youth;
- Adrian Shanker, founder and executive director of Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center; and
- Darrell Wheeler, senior vice president for academic affairs at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y.
The changes underscore the new approach to HIV/AIDS Biden promised during his presidential campaign. Among them is beating HIV/AIDS domestically by 2025, which is five years earlier than the plan under the Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative that began in the Trump administration. Whether or not Biden will meet that ambitious goal remains to be seen.
Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS, hailed the nomination of Nkengasong to the global AIDS position upon news of the announcement.
“John Nkengasong’s vast experience in combatting HIV, combined with his position as Africa’s leading disease expert fighting Ebola, COVID-19 and more, position him extremely well to guide the United States’ global contribution towards ending the AIDS pandemic,” Byanyima said. “Today, the HIV and COVID-19 pandemics are colliding in communities throughout the world, and the threat of a resurgent AIDS pandemic is very real. We need the kind of bold thinking and commitment he has brought throughout his career.”
While the global AIDS appointment will have a role in international programs, such as PEPFAR and U.S. participation in the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis & Malaria, the PACHA appointments will focus on both domestic and global perspectives.
Schmid, executive director of the HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute, said despite the change in leadership he will maintain his role as head of the subcommittee on the Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative.
“It’s good,” Schmid said.”They appointed a lot of African-American community, Latino community [members] and they said they’ll rotate co-chairs,” Schmid said. “I think it’s good that they put on new blood, and new leadership.”
Schmid has been a vocal skeptic about Biden being able to meet his goal to beat HIV by 2025 — as opposed to the 2030 target set by the previous administration — but said the realignment in PACHA was “not at all” related to that.
“I think I was replaced because the Biden administration wanted the leadership of PACHA to be more representative of the current epidemic in the United States,” Schmid said.
Schmid, however, refused to back down from his prediction that Biden won’t be able to make his 2025 goal a reality.
“I think you will find wide agreement within the HIV community that it is not feasible to end HIV by 2025,” Schmid said. “There is just too much work to do and change to happen.”
The new appointments will add to the cadre of Biden appointees engaged on HIV/AIDS, including Harold Phillips, who was appointed in June to lead the White House Office of National AIDS Policy after that position remained vacant for the entirety of the Trump administration.
‘Too early’ to gauge effort to beat HIV domestically
The focus of the appointees on the domestic front will be the Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative, a plan heavily focused on PrEP as a means of preventing HIV in an effort to reduce new incidents of infections by 90 percent within 10 years. The program was launched in 2019.
Although Congress has appropriated money for the initiative, and just last week, the Department of Health & Human Services distributed $48 million to HRSA centers as part of the effort, experts say not enough data is available to tell to whether or not the program has been effective.
Jennifer Kates, senior vice president and director of global health & HIV policy at Kaiser Family Foundation, said data isn’t yet available on whether new incidents of HIV are reduced because the latest data is from fiscal year 2019.
“From the perspective of the timeline of the goals of the initiative, it’s too early, we wouldn’t know that anyway, but just even given the context and what’s happened since it started, I just don’t know how you’d evaluate it,” Kates said. “What I do believe is important though, is the idea of dedicated new funding. It was the first new funding provided to HIV for years that’s been channeled to local jurisdictions [and] has the potential to catalyze new and better responses, but we don’t know yet that’s happened.”
The coronavirus pandemic, which has been the top priority for health officials around the world, is also obfuscating any potential assessment of the Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative.
Daniel Bruner, senior director of policy at the D.C.-based Whitman-Walker Institute, said the coronavirus has “dramatically impacted medical care,” including HIV/AIDS efforts.
“The pandemic has also necessitated substantial shifts in federal, state, and local resources into COVID prevention, diagnosis and treatment,” Bruner said. “Therefore, it is premature to draw any conclusions about the EHE initiative’s effectiveness. The federal government has emphasized its continuing commitment to the EHE initiative, and Whitman-Walker also remains committed to that work.”
Congress
Chris Van Hollen says the Democratic Party needs change. Is he the one to lead it?
Senator is backing anti-establishment Democrats across the country
By LEE O. SANDERLIN | The Democratic Party is having something of an identity crisis — losing to President Donald Trump twice in three elections will do that.
Should the party embrace anti-establishment figures who espouse progressive policy ideas like Medicare for all and rhetoric about unrigging the economy for the 1 percent? Or should Democrats try to appeal to moderates who want to return to semi-normalcy in a time of political upheaval?
Although he’s been in Congress since 2002, with key leadership roles throughout his tenure, Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, 67, counts himself firmly in the anti-establishment camp.
The rest of this article can be found on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
National
New data shows record-high LGBTQ population amid Trump attacks
12% of adults — 25.6 million people — identify as part of the community
The Human Rights Campaign Foundation (HRC Foundation), the public education, research, and policy arm of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group in the United States, has released new data showing that there are more LGBTQ+ identifying people than ever before, just as the Trump administration continues efforts to minimize LGBTQ+ rights and visibility.
The data, released late last week, includes a multitude of updated population estimates for LGBTQ+ identifying people in the United States. It shows that a record-high 12% of U.S. adults — roughly 25.6 million people — identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or gender diverse.
The numbers were drawn from more than 2.4 million responses to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey collected between 2021 and 2024. The Household Pulse Survey is one of the last major federal data sources to include a gender identity measure before the Trump administration removed sexual orientation and gender identity questions from roughly 360 federal data collections.
HRC President Kelley Robinson spoke about the data, emphasizing that it shows not only that the LGBTQ+ community is bigger than the Trump administration would have Americans believe, but that LGBTQ+ Americans continue to be targeted for no reason other than being different.
“LGBTQ+ Americans are everywhere. There are 25 million of us across the country, and we now have critical mass in almost every state in the nation,” Robinson said in a statement. “We’re not a niche constituency, and no campaign, brand, or employer can afford to treat us like one.”
The survey also collected other important information about LGBTQ+ Americans.
40: The number of states with an LGBTQ+ population greater than 10%, plus the District of Columbia. This includes electoral battleground states such as Arizona (13.34%), Georgia (11.46%), Michigan (10.95%), New Hampshire (11.88%), North Carolina (10.56%), Ohio (11.29%), Pennsylvania (11.14%), and Texas (12.54%).
25.6 million: Number of U.S. adults who identify as LGBTQ+.
12% : Percentage of the adult population who identify as LGBTQ+.
More than half of all LGBTQ+ adults (53.8%) are between 18 and 34 — a signal of sustained, long-term growth in political and economic power as this generation ages into peak spending and voting years.
Other recent studies show that nearly 30% of the adult Gen Z population identifies as LGBTQ+.
The data also shows growing diversity across the community. Hispanic adults make up a larger share of the LGBTQ+ population (18%) than of non-LGBTQ+ adults (13%). Black adults make up a smaller share, about 9%, compared to 12%, reinforcing that LGBTQ+ identity cuts across every racial and ethnic community.
Bisexual+ people are the largest group, at over 7% of all U.S. adults.
Tari Hanneman, HRC Foundation’s senior director of research and education, spoke about how the White House’s recent decision to remove LGBTQ-specific data questions from federal surveys undermines the purpose of federal data collection: to collect data that accurately reflects the U.S. population, regardless of political ideology.
“Reliable data are essential for understanding who lives in this country and what our communities need to thrive,” Hanneman said. “Removing sexual orientation and gender identity questions from surveys like the one used for this analysis introduces significant gaps in this understanding. These findings show that LGBTQ+ people are a substantial and growing segment of the population, underscoring the need for our continued inclusion in data collection efforts.”
The data also included key demographics about the age of LGBTQ+ people, showing that younger Americans are increasingly more likely to identify as LGBTQ+, while overall, all age groups saw an increase in people self-identifying as LGBTQ+ in the data.
More than half of LGBTQ+ adults (approximately 54%) are younger than 35, compared with about 22% of non-LGBTQ+ adults. Adults ages 25–34 constitute roughly one-third of the LGBTQ+ adult population.
The data also shows a similar generational pattern within age groups. Nearly 32% of adults ages 18–24 and 22% of adults ages 25–34 identify as LGBTQ+, compared with approximately 12% of adults ages 35–44 and less than 8% of each older age group.
The data also included statistics on the education levels of LGBTQ+ Americans, indicating that they are more likely to have some college education or an associate degree than their non-LGBTQ+ peers.
LGBTQ+ adults are more likely (34.57%) to have an associate degree or some college experience and less likely to have only a high school education or less, or a graduate degree.
According to a report from the Williams Institute, a research organization dedicated to collecting and explaining data on LGBTQ+ people and related policy, during the first year of the second Trump administration, approximately 360 federal data collections removed at least one sexual orientation or gender identity measure, including 338 that removed gender identity measures and at least 60 that removed sexual orientation measures.
The Williams Institute, along with HRC, asserts that these changes diminish the federal government’s capacity to measure LGBTQ+ populations and understand their experiences and needs — something that should be detrimental to federal data collection and assessment, regardless of what political ideology one subscribes to.
In 2024, the Census Bureau conducted a large-scale test of questions on sexual orientation and gender identity for possible inclusion in the American Community Survey, the nation’s primary source of detailed demographic data. The test involved nearly half a million households, but the Bureau has not released the promised reports and datasets showing how those questions performed. In September 2025 Democracy Forward filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking their release, alleging that the Census Bureau had unlawfully withheld the records.
The HRC Foundation also provided information about the methodology used to produce its estimates. The data uses weighted surveys conducted through its Community Insights research program. Community Insights is an opt-in research panel rather than a probability sample of the U.S. population; demographic benchmarks are used to adjust survey data so that respondents more closely reflect the broader LGBTQ+ adult population.
The HRC Foundation selected the Household Pulse Survey due to its large sample size, national probability-based design, detailed demographic data, separate measures for sexual orientation and gender identity, and availability of public-use survey weights.
The analysis includes 37 rounds of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey conducted between 2021 and 2024, yielding 2,452,769 responses before exclusions for missing or imputed data.
HRC’s estimate of 12.03% is based on the Census Bureau’s self-administered Household Pulse Survey, while Gallup’s most recent estimate of 9% is based on telephone interviews and a different approach to measuring LGBTQ+ identity.
HRC has suggested that self-administered surveys may offer greater privacy when people answer sensitive questions, which may contribute to differences in disclosure.
The analysis classifies respondents as lesbian or gay, bisexual+, transgender, or gender-expansive. The bisexual+ category includes respondents who selected bisexual as well as those who selected another sexual identity not represented by the available categories. The transgender or gender-expansive classification is determined using respondents’ reported sex assigned at birth and current gender identity.
The move to remove LGBTQ+ people from federal data collection is just one of many things the Trump-Vance administration has taken to minimize — if not hide — LGBTQ+ people in the country.
From the anti-transgender military executive order, which attempted to bar new recruits and remove transgender military members already serving, signed in January 2025, to attempts to prohibit gender-affirming medical care in federal health care programs and all but destroy gender-affirming care for minors, the administration has pursued a series of policies affecting LGBTQ+ Americans.
The administration has also attempted to make biological sex the only definition of gender on federal paperwork, rolled back DEI programs across the federal government, and taken other steps affecting how LGBTQ+ people are represented and recognized in federal policy and data collection.
Canada
Monument to LGBTQ Canadians officially unveiled
Thunderhead honors those who suffered government-sanctioned discrimination
A monument that pays tribute to LGBTQ Canadians who suffered government-sanctioned persecution and discrimination officially opened in Ottawa on Aug. 21.
Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Governor General Louise Arbour, and Women and Gender Equality Minister Rechie Valdez are among those who attended the ceremony.
A Canadian government press release notes Thunderhead, which is located on Parliament Hill, “recognizes the historic discrimination faced by 2SLGBTQI+ (two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, plus) people in Canada, including during the LGBT (lesbiennes, gaies, bisexuelles, trans) Purge.”
(French and English are Canada’s official languages.)
Trudeau in 2017 formally apologized to Canadians who suffered persecution and discrimination under the country’s anti-LGBTQ laws — including those convicted of “gross indecency” before Canada decriminalized consensual same-sex sexual relations — and policies. Trudeau also formally apologized to those who were fired from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the country’s military and civil service from the 1950s to the mid-1990s because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
The Canadian government later settled a class action lawsuit that LGBT Purge victims filed.
The settlement funded the monument.
The Canadian government’s press release notes an “all Canadian team” from Winnipeg, Manitoba, designed it. The monument is also located on the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation’s traditional territory.
“It celebrates the resilience and achievements of those who fought for equality, educates visitors, and inspires the change still needed so that everyone can openly love who they love and express and identify themselves as they choose,” reads the press release.
“Thunderhead stands as a tribute to the lives, stories, and contributions of 2SLGBTQI+ people across Canada,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney on Facebook. “It’s reminder of the discrimination too many endured — and honors those who fought to build a country where everyone can live freely, safely, and with dignity.”
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