Health
Incoming AMA president: ‘We simply will not stand’ for anti-trans healthcare restrictions
Org will use ‘every avenue available’ to push back
Doctor Jesse Ehrenfeld sat down with the Washington Blade on Tuesday, weeks ahead of the start of his tenure as the American Medical Association’s first openly gay president and amid an onslaught of legislative attacks targeting trans Americans’ access to healthcare.
“We see the attack on reproductive care, reproductive access, and transgender healthcare as a continuum of government overreach into patient-physician decision making,” Ehrenfeld said.
“We simply will not stand for the government coming in to interfere with the doctor-patient relationship,” such as by passing these laws that “outlaw what we know to be appropriate, evidence-based clinical guidelines-based care,” he said.
An anesthesiologist who served as the Joseph A. Johnson Jr. Distinguished Leadership Professor of anesthesiology, surgery, biomedical informatics & health policy at Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine, much of Ehrenfeld’s professional background has been focused on matters of healthcare access, particularly for LGBTQ patients.
Ehrenfeld directs a $560 million philanthropic organization, Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment, while also serving as a consultant for the World Health Organization’s Digital Health Technical Advisory Group. He was special adviser to former U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who served during the Trump administration.
For his research on “understanding how can we use technology to work better for LGBTQ people,” in 2018 Ehrenfeld became the inaugural recipient of the NIH’s Sexual and Gender Minority Research Investigator Award.
He and his team did much of the work for that project at Vanderbilt’s Program for LGBTQ Health, which he co-founded and led for several years “before I took on my current clinical role in Wisconsin.”
“At the end of the day,” Ehrenfeld said, “we’re really about improving access to health care for LGBTQ people, which is a lot of the work that I have been involved in at the AMA and is a core piece of what we’re trying to do nationally through our policy activities.”
In testimony before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee in 2019, Ehrenfeld told lawmakers: “I would like to state unequivocally that there is no medically valid reason—including a diagnosis of gender dysphoria—to exclude transgender individuals from military service.”
Last year, far-right anti-trans pundit Matt Walsh targeted Vanderbilt’s Transgender Health Clinic on his podcast, leading conservative lawmakers in Tennessee to call for investigations of the institution based on information the university claims was “misrepresented” or taken out of context.
“It’s deeply personal for me,” Ehrenfeld said. “Almost everybody that I helped recruit and hire at Vanderbilt, their personal information was shared online. Their names were on TV. And that has had a chilling effect [both] there and in many places across the country, as there have been attempts to intimidate and threaten practitioners who are providing what we know is evidence based appropriate care.”
A big moment for Ehrenfeld and the AMA
Ehrenfeld will be inaugurated as AMA president on June 13, midway through Pride month. It will be an exciting time, he said. “The AMA will have our first contingent walking in the Chicago Pride Parade…so, my husband and the family and the kids will all be there with a bunch of AMA colleagues celebrating at the end of June.”
“It’s an exciting moment for the organization, but I think also for the community for a bunch of reasons,” Ehrenfeld said. “One is, you know, to be an out person in a very visible role, I think sends a message to patients in the community as well as LGBTQ physicians and other healthcare workers, that their needs are being heard in a way that hasn’t always happened,” notwithstanding “challenges that are happening in many places on the legislative level.”
On a personal level, he said, “growing up, I didn’t have a lot of LGBTQ role models in college and medical school who I saw as defining a career pathway for me.” This meant “I would often question, ‘would I have a role? Was there a place for me as an out person in medicine, in leadership, doing policy work, trying to make the community healthier and improve access to health care?'”
Ehrenfeld said his leadership of the AMA marks an “important moment” in the organization’s history, demonstrating what is now possible for LGBTQ people who historically were denied these types of opportunities.
Anti-trans laws worsen systemic issues in healthcare
“The AMA opposes any policy “that creates a barrier between a patient and their doctor making a decision that’s in the patient’s best interests,” Ehrenfeld said, which includes “efforts to ban care for transgender people” at the state and federal level. “We stand for the science, the evidence, [and] the clinical guidelines that we know lead to better outcomes for patients.”
Even beyond healthcare restrictions that are passed legislatively, “we have a lot of backseat drivers trying to tell doctors what to do,” Ehrenfeld said, like “insurance companies who put up barriers around prior authorization for getting approval for care and services.”
“Those things are real and they cause people to give up trying to get the care they need,” he said.
Six states have passed laws criminalizing certain healthcare interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria, which carry the specter of felony charges for healthcare providers. These, Ehrenfeld said, are the most “heartbreaking” for him personally.
Survey data says one in five physicians is experiencing signs of burnout, with an increase beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic, Ehrenfeld said. “That burnout is only exacerbated when you find yourself practicing in a place where a law is passed that tells you how to practice or [tells you] that you can’t practice.”
“That causes moral injury to a physician who finds an untenable choice: provide the care that they know is in the patient’s best interests, or break the law and [potentially] go to jail,” Ehrenfeld said. “And that stress is real. There’s not a week that goes by that I don’t hear from a colleague who says I can’t take it anymore.”
Beyond impacts felt by individual healthcare workers, “we’ve seen a drop in the number of physicians who are applying for training positions in states where care is being restricted,” he said. “When, suddenly, you don’t have specialists and internists and primary care providers working in a state, that impacts care for everybody.”
Anti-trans legislative restrictions on healthcare are increasingly targeting adults, too. Florida’s S.B. 254, which would allow the state to take children away from parents who facilitate their access to best-practices treatments for gender dysphoria, would also bar all Floridians from accessing gender affirming care via telehealth, or that which is administered by nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants.
“Telehealth is particularly important for a lot of LGBTQ people because of access distance challenges and the need to seek care in places that often is not immediately local,” Ehrenfeld said.
“There’s this cascading effect of, unfortunately reducing access to care that’s very concerning to me and to the AMA,” he said.
When laws proscribe healthcare interventions that “we know to be appropriate,” Ehrenfeld said, “we use every avenue available” – from pressuring the National Governors Association to filing lawsuits and amicus briefs in coordination with other stakeholders as well as “work on the policy side at the federal level and with our state partners.”
Health
CMS moves to expand HIV-positive organ transplants
HIV/AIDS activists welcome potential development
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is pushing forward a proposed rule that would make it not only easier for people with HIV in need to get organ transplants from HIV-positive donors, but also make it a priority where there was often a barrier.
The Washington Blade sat down with people familiar with this topic — from former heads of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to HIV activists and to the first HIV-positive person to donate an organ — about what this proposed change could mean.
HIV is a virus that attacks the body’s immune system, particularly targeting the body’s T-cells, which makes it harder to fight off infection and disease. If left untreated, HIV can become AIDS. Without treatment, AIDS can lead to death within a few months or years. The virus is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids — often through sex, unclean needles, or from mother to baby during pregnancy.
According to HIV.gov, a website managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, approximately 1.2 million people in the U.S. were living with HIV in 2022. Of those 1.2 million, 13 percent don’t know they have it.
The virus disproportionately impacts men who have sex with men and people of color.
The CDC’s statistics show men are most affected, making up almost 80 percent of diagnoses, with gay and bisexual men accounting for the majority. Racial disparities also are present — Black people make up 38 percent of diagnoses. The World Health Organization estimates that around 44.1 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses globally as of 2024.
Since the virus was first detected 45 years ago, scientists have been working on ways to treat and prevent its spread. In 1987, the first breakthrough in fighting HIV came as the U.S. approved the first HIV medication, AZT — marking the beginning of antiretroviral therapy. This medicine — and later descendants of it, like today’s widely prescribed Biktarvy — stop the HIV virus from reproducing and allow the body to keep its T-cells.
Then in 2012, another big step toward minimizing the scope of the potentially fatal disease came as the CDC approved the first HIV prevention medication, Truvada, more commonly known as PrEP. As of 2024, nearly 600,000 people in the U.S. are using PrEP, according to AIDSVu, which uses data from Gilead Sciences (manufacturers of Truvada and Biktarvy) and is compiled by researchers at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.
The following year, in 2013, the HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act was signed into law, enabling the use of organs from HIV-positive donors for transplants into HIV-positive recipients, overturning a 1988 ban.
There are an estimated 123,000 people waiting for organ transplants in the U.S. The number of HIV-positive people on that list is estimated to be smaller, harder to precisely quantify, but they are still in dire need.
A study from the New England Journal of Medicine, published in 2024, analyzed the outcomes of 198 kidney transplantations to people with HIV at 26 medical centers across the U.S. from 2018 to 2021.
Results from the study showed that for kidney transplants performed using organs from 99 donors with HIV and 99 without HIV, one-year survival rates for HIV-positive recipients were nearly identical (94 percent and 95 percent, respectively). Three-year survival rates were also similar (85 percent and 87 percent). Organ rejection rates were also numerically on par after three years (21 percent and 24 percent). Other measures for surgical outcomes, including the number of side effects that occurred, were also roughly the same for both groups.
This shows that, overall, HIV-positive-to-HIV-positive transplants are nearly identical in outcome to transplants between HIV-negative donors and recipients.
Where we are now
Now in 2026, CMS is pushing past the clinical trial testing phase it has been in, making HIV-positive-to-HIV-positive organ transplants more widespread and more accessible.
Adrian Shanker, the former deputy assistant secretary for health policy and senior advisor on LGBTQ health equity at HHS, explained to the Blade that the HOPE Act was a step in the right direction, but this policy change from CMS will expand the ability to help HIV-positive patients in need.
“The original HOPE Act asked for scientific research,” Shanker explained. “There were 10 years of clinical trials. The Biden administration promulgated a rule that removed clinical trial requirements for kidney and liver transplants between people living with HIV. This proposed rule is further implementation on the CMS side with the organ procurement organizations to ensure they’re carrying out the stated intent of the HOPE Act law. It’s building on consensus that has existed through multiple administrations.”
The proposed change would go into effect on July 1, and, according to Shanker, would help everyone in need of an organ — not just HIV-positive people.
“People living with HIV, their ability to receive organs from other people living with HIV in a more streamlined way means that the overall organ waitlist is sped up as well,” he added. “So it benefits everyone on the waitlist.”
Shanker, who was also a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, spoke about how this is a rare moment of bipartisanship.
“There’s no secret that the Trump administration has been quite adversarial to LGBTQI plus health, and to the health of people living with HIV/HIV prevention resources as well … From destabilizing PEPFAR to shutting down one of the primary implementation partners, which is USAID, to firing almost the entire staff of the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV Policy at HHS … But what this is is a glimmer of hope that we can have bipartisan solutions that improve quality of life for people living with HIV.”
Harold Phillips, the CEO of NMAC, a national HIV/AIDS organization that pushes policy education and public engagement to end the HIV epidemic, and an HIV-positive American, sees this as a huge gain for the HIV-positive community.
“For a number of years, we were excluded from that pool of potential donors,” Phillips said. “Many people living with HIV were excluded from being able to get organ transplants. So this opens up that door. This is a positive step forward that will help save lives.”
That “open door,” Phillips said, does more than just provide life-saving organs to people in the most need. It provides a sense of being able to support their community.
“I remember when I was no longer able to check that box on my driver’s license,” Phillips recalled during his interview with the Blade. “I remember what that meant — that my organs might not be able to save a life. The potential that now they could is really exciting for me.”
“To think about people living with HIV donating their organs to other people living with HIV and helping extend their health and well-being — that’s an exciting moment in our history. It reinforces that HIV is not a death sentence anymore.”
Human Rights Campaign Senior Public Policy Advocate Matt Rose also sat down with the Blade to explain the realities of HIV-positive people in the U.S. right now who are looking for a transplant.
“If you’re HIV positive and on the waitlist for an organ right now, your chance of getting one is slim to nil,” Rose said. “This at least gives you a real shot.”
He went on to explain that while the HOPE Act started to move in the right direction, it hasn’t done enough for HIV-positive people in dire need.
“This bill [HOPE] was supposed to fix that — and it never really has. But every administration, we keep chipping away at the next hurdle,” he said. “This latest move will drastically expand the ability for someone who is HIV positive to donate an organ.”
That slow chipping away, in addition to the non-stop trials being done to prove the efficacy and ability for HIV-positive people’s bodies to accept organ donation, is part of the broader push to normalize this practice and remove outdated restrictions.
Shanker elaborated, explaining all that time was necessary to figure out the efficacy of HIV-positive-to-HIV-positive organ transplants but now that the data has been collected — its time to expand the availability.
“There were over a decade of clinical trials between the original HOPE Act law being signed by President Obama and our rule being promulgated at the end of the Biden administration. It was to allow those clinical trials to run their course,” Shanker said.
Nina Martinez is the first HIV-positive person to donate an organ to another person with HIV.
She explained that the stigma and lack of understanding from the general public is another hurdle that those working to improve the quality of life for people living with HIV have to deal with.
“People don’t generally understand that treatment works,” Martinez said, who became the first person to undergo HIV-positive organ donation in 2019. “When you have access to antiretroviral therapy, it lowers the virus in your bloodstream to levels so low that lab tests can’t detect it. Clinically, that correlates to good health and an inability to transmit HIV sexually. I was healthy enough to pass the same evaluation as any other living donor without HIV.”
She continued explaining:
“Just by having a diagnosis of HIV, they’re labeling donors as medically complex, and that’s not accurate. Every donor with HIV has to pass the same evaluation as donors without HIV,” she said. “If someone passes that evaluation and still isn’t allowed to donate, that’s discrimination. If a patient is willing to accept that organ and you block it because of preconceived notions, you’re denying someone care based on disability. That runs counter to basic fairness.”
When asked about her decision to become a donor and what message she hopes it sends, Martinez emphasized that the choice should remain personal.
“I didn’t undertake this endeavor to say that people with HIV should donate. This is a community that’s been through a lot and has contributed to science — we have served. But for people who wanted a way to leave a legacy, and that is what I wanted, they should be supported in that. There shouldn’t be arcane scientific perceptions and myths getting in the way of that.”
National Donor Day, which raises awareness of organ donation, is on Feb. 14. To become an organ donor, visit registerme.org.
Health
CVS Health agrees to cover new HIV prevention drug
‘Groundbreaking’ PrEP medication taken by injection once every six months
CVS Health, the nation’s second largest pharmacy benefit manager company that plays a key role in deciding which drugs are covered by health insurance policies, has belatedly agreed to cover the new highly acclaimed HIV prevention drug yeztugo.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the use of yeztugo as an HIV prevention or “PrEP” medication in June 2025 as the first such drug to be taken by injection just once every six months. AIDS activists hailed the drug as a major breakthrough in the longstanding effort to end the HIV epidemic.
“We are pleased that CVS Health has finally decided to cover this groundbreaking new PrEP mediation,” said Carl Schmid, executive director of the HIV+ Hepatitis Policy Institute.
“Four months ago, 63 HIV organizations joined us in sending a letter to CVS’s president urging them to reconsider their refusal to cover Yeztugo and reminding them of their legal obligation to cover PrEP and describe the important benefits the drug would bring to preventing HIV in the U.S.,” Schmid said in a statement.
He noted that CVS Health now joins other leading pharmacy benefit manager companies and insurers in covering yeztugo. Gilead Sciences, the pharmaceutical company that developed and manufactures yeztugo, has said 85 percent of all people with health insurance in the U.S. now have coverage for the drug, according to Schmid.
“However, coverage does not automatically translate into access and usage,” Schmid said in his statement. “Too many people are being forced to pay copays while other payers, including employers, are failing to cover all forms of PrEP,” he said.
According to Schmid, the HIV+ Hepatitis Policy Institute is joining other HIV advocacy organizations in urging federal and state government officials to engage in “aggressive enforcement of PrEP insurance coverage requirements and sustained funding of state, local, and community HIV prevention programs.”
Health
Choose U ambassadors share lived experiences with HIV, personal reflections, and insights
The Choose U World AIDS Day panel brought together three longtime advocates living with HIV to talk about care, stigma, and what living with HIV over the long-term means to them. The conversation featured Jahlove Serrano, Joyce Belton, and Andrew Nichols, who have each lived with HIV for more than 20 years. News is Out hosted the event in partnership with Gilead Sciences.
“Co-created with community representatives from around the world, Choose U is comprised of inspiring examples of how the outlook for aging with HIV has dramatically changed,” Gilead shared in the recent launch of the program. “By focusing on the real-world experiences of people in different circumstances, Choose U spotlights individuals prioritizing starting and staying on HIV treatment, self-care, and overall strategies to help them lead healthier lives.”
The Choose U ambassadors opened with a clear message: Lived experience drives understanding.
Each panelist talked through the decisions, relationships, and periods of uncertainty that shaped their HIV care. They also described their approaches to HIV treatment and adherence, including the importance of staying on treatment to help lower the risk of HIV drug resistance. They reflected on the shifts they have seen in HIV treatment over the decades, the value of honest conversations with providers, and how staying engaged in care and on HIV treatment helped them lead longer, healthier lives.
The panel discussed U=U, which stands for “Undetectable equals Untransmittable.” Undetectable means there is so little virus in the blood that a lab test can’t measure it. Research shows that taking HIV treatment as prescribed, and getting to and staying undetectable, prevents HIV from spreading through sex.
The panelists also spoke about the emotional side of living with HIV over the long-term and the stigma they have faced. Joyce described a personal moment when her pastor visited her in the hospital and how that experience began her work educating her church community about HIV.
Jahlove talked about how his biological family reacted to his diagnosis. “When I disclosed my status, they told me that I put a shame on the family,” said Jahlove. When he shared his status with his peers, they responded with support, which gave him a sense of empowerment.
Andrew, a professional therapist, described how he has experienced stigma in dating and in his workplace, and why he turns to therapy for guidance. “Therapy has really helped me rebuild my confidence and realize my self-worth has to come from me,” said Andrew. “Then after that, I can help with the greater community.”
The panel closed with a message for others living with HIV: They encouraged viewers to start and stay engaged in HIV treatment and care, ask questions, and rely on supportive networks. Their stories show how starting and staying on treatment over the long-term, community, and affirmation can shape well-being.
A recording of the full 30-minute event is now available on YouTube, which you can access here.
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