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AMSTERDAM -- The 2020 International AIDS Conference (IAC) in San Francisco and Oakland is still 2 years away, but protests around it have already erupted, with activists objecting to U.S. government policies as discriminatory.
Citing "danger for potential participants and human rights violations in the U.S. under the Trump administration," the group marched through the halls of the convention center and even took to the streets here at the to protest the meeting's next host city.
Linda-Gail Bekker, MBChB, PhD, president of the International AIDS Society, the IAC's organizer, addressed the issue during this meeting's opening press conference. The choice of venue was made in a "democratically motivated way," she said. "We are obviously not oblivious to the community's thoughts about this [but] we have never shied away from controversy in terms of political machinations."
HIVPowerShift's website describes the organization as "an alliance of members of networks in the United States of people living with HIV and those among key populations targeted, detained, deported, and tortured by the Trump regime."
"From fear-based visa policies and immigration raids to direct attacks on the safety of sex workers, from transphobia to the resurgence of white supremacy -- the United States of America is anything but united," Cecilia Chung, of Transgender Law Center, an Oakland-based advocacy group, said in a statement. "Hosting AIDS 2020 in California ... goes against the International AIDS Society's own values of being inclusive, human-rights focused, and evidence-based."
San Francisco is no stranger to IAC meeting controversy. The meeting was held in 1990 in San Francisco, 3 years after the U.S. passed a law banning HIV-positive travelers from entering the country. The government waived the ban for the meeting, but refused to revoke it entirely, according to the IAS website.
That event was marred by threats of boycotts, protests and even bomb threats, and the IAS governing council took action. Paul Volberding, MD, of the University of California San Francisco, and IAS president at the time, told 鶹ý that they "voted overwhelmingly in favor of boycotting the U.S. going forward from 1990 until the law [banning HIV-positive individuals from entering the country] was changed."
IAC returned to the U.S. in 2012 once the ban was lifted under President Obama, he said.
Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) -- and perhaps the most prominent federal official in attendance at this conference -- argued that to pull the meeting out of San Francisco is "the exact opposite of what should be done."
"I think that's a bad idea. I think to have it in San Francisco would emphasize ... the importance of this problem, that the United States still takes it seriously," he said during a session. "To not have it in the United States would almost be admitting defeat."
Fauci also commented that the U.S. is "overwhelmingly the largest funder of research in HIV," including the PEPFAR program, and that the country gives one third of the Global Fund.
But some participants at this year's conference remained skeptical. "HIV criminalization is part of a much larger problem in the current and former administrations in the U.S. of controlling and punishing bodies among people who are different from the ruling classes and things are only getting worse," said Edwin Bernard, global coordinator of the HIV Justice Network.
"It was just announced that people who are HIV positive will no longer be allowed to serve in the military and there is, of course, disproportionate impact of prosecutions of people of color and who are marginalized such as sex workers, in particular, and transpeople and trans sex workers," he said at a press conference. "So, the U.S. is not a safe place and I think it actually would behest the IAS to reconsider holding the conference in the United States in 2020."
Mitchell Warren, executive director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, agreed that it was fair to raise issues about the conference, but he did not want it to be "a distraction."
"If the IAS continues to have the conferences in the U.S., I hope they would put very clear milestones that if certain things don't happen, they would cancel the conference," he told 鶹ý. "I'd rather see no conference than one that was pure distraction. These conferences are just a blip in time ... [they] are not what makes the AIDS response."
However, a challenge may have been what the IAS was looking for when the venue was chosen. Sharon Lewin, FRACP, PhD, of the University of Melbourne in Australia, and a member of the IAS governing council, said that when the conference was hosted in her city in 2014, it served as a "platform for change."
Lewin said that she hoped that if there were "issues around visas and access and policies, it's an agent for change" and that many conferences have been used to accomplish that.
IAS Executive Director Owen Ryan, MPH, told 鶹ý that conference locations are picked to "embrace the narrative of the community that's there" -- in this case, the disparities in the Bay Area. To abandon it would send a message that the world feels that area is not relevant, he said.
"I always say, I don't think the conference is a platform for celebration, I think it's a platform for critique and evaluation, and the U.S. is a place that needs that right now," Ryan said. "We're committed to this fight in the Bay Area. We're going to Oakland and San Francisco."