SF rally planned for HIV/AIDS support
Concerned that San Francisco's historic focus on HIV/AIDS services and care have been diminished, several advocacy groups are planning a rally and die-in at City Hall on Monday, March 21.Organizers are calling on San Francisco's leaders "to 'take back' HIV as a major priority in our city," according to a news release quoting Dr.
Monica Gandhi, the medical director of Ward 86, the HIV clinic at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Gandhi is a featured speaker at the event, scheduled for 11 a.m.
outside City Hall at 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place.Calling it "a lack of attention" to HIV on the city's part, organizer Paul Aguilar, a gay man and chair of the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club's HIV Caucus, said, "The lack of interest is 40 years of complacency." Forty years later, he added, there is neither a vaccine nor a cure.
Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the first reported cases by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of what would come to be known as AIDS.Statistics from 2020's HIV Epidemiology Annual Report, issued last year by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, show some alarming numbers concerning HIV, particularly in regard to the impact of COVID on HIV care in the city.
