David Furnish warns politics is undoing decades of progress against AIDS
David Furnish and Elton John attend the Elton John AIDS Foundation’s 32nd Annual Academy Awards in 2024. (Getty)
David Furnish and Elton John attend the Elton John AIDS Foundation’s 32nd Annual Academy Awards in 2024. (Getty) (Image: Getty Images for Elton John AIDS)
David Furnish has warned that criminalisation and defunding of LGBTQ+ civil society is pulling apart the community-led HIV response, putting hard-won progress against AIDS at risk, in an Independent Voices comment piece.
“I am writing this because that legacy is now at risk. The threat isn’t the virus.It’s politics,” Furnish wrote. He argued that governments are cutting prevention and care systems that rely on trust, outreach and public data, particularly in places where stigma makes it harder for LGBTQ+ people to access healthcare.
Furnish also pointed to newer prevention tools, writing that long-acting PrEP, including twice-yearly options like lenacapavir, is “one of the most significant advances in HIV prevention in a generation”.
He said the rollback is already visible in key indicators. “In the United States, the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR), the programme credited with saving 26 million lives, has seen a 41 per cent reduction in PrEP initiation,” he wrote, adding that its data shows 4.7 million fewer people were tested for HIV in 2025 than in 2024.
ACT UP and the fight for faster medicine
Furnish traced today’s HIV prevention and treatment systems back to AIDS activism in the 1980s and 1990s, arguing that campaigners reshaped how medicine responds to urgent need. In October 1988, around 1,500 ACT UP members protested at the US Food and Drug Administration headquarters in Maryland.
Furnish wrote that, within months, the FDA committed to dramatically shortening its drug approval process, and that an accelerated approval pathway was formally launched in 1992.
Criminalisation, data loss and LGBTQ+ funding cuts
Furnish wrote that in 2025 UNAIDS confirmed the number of countries criminalising same-sex sexual activity and the gender expression of trans and gender diverse people rose for the first time since monitoring began in 2008, adding that LGBTQ+ civil society organisations are being “defunded, restricted, or closed”.
“When governments stop counting LGBTQ+ people, they make them easier to abandon,” he wrote, adding: “Equality is not separate from public health. It is public health.”
Furnish is a Canadian filmmaker and producer who is married to Elton John. He chairs the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which works in more than 40 countries, and has supported HIV prevention, treatment and LGBTQ+ community programmes, including joining forces with the UK’s only LGBTQ+ national lottery.
