Why Fixing the Failure to Address the Latino HIV Crisis Matters for Everyone
Because of the severity of the HIV epidemic in Latino communities, if the crisis is not brought under control, it will have consequences for the entire nation.
Failing to act has cost us dearly
Investing now to confront this long-ignored crisis will pay dividends for every American—halting the epidemic’s spread, cutting healthcare costs, and strengthening communities across the nation.
Taking urgent action requires the continuous availability of reliable HIV surveillance data. Yet recent federal funding cuts and programmatic shifts have undermined this once-assured foundation. Coupled with reductions in the CDC’s HIV prevention workforce, the release of annual HIV incidence estimates—originally scheduled for 2025—has been delayed. At the same time, the most recent data show an increase in new HIV diagnoses among Latinos between 2022 and 2023.
We Have the Tools to Fix the Failure
Increase Visibility
Use every opportunity to educate others about the Latino cascading disaster and the urgent need to act—because invisibility breeds inaction.
Confront Bias
Challenge harmful misperceptions by correcting the narrative: Latinos are vital to the nation’s health and future, and the Latino HIV crisis can no longer be ignored.
Strengthen Response
Bolster the public health response with sustained investment in Latino-focused HIV services, programs and research that optimize HIV continuum outcomes.
Protect & Expand
Safeguard the integrity and availability of public health data that help identify problems and guide evidence-based solutions to prevention and treatment inequities.
Address SDOH
Confront harmful social determinants of health—like anti-immigrant sentiment, poverty, housing insecurity, and discrimination—and integrate clinical and social care to optimize prevention and treatment outcomes.
Collective Action
All sectors can play a decisive role in ending the disaster. Government, pharmaceutical companies, national HIV organizations, research institutions, and Latino-serving nonprofits must do more to fix the failure.
For too long, too many have stayed on the sidelines while the Latino HIV crisis has worsened into a cascading disaster. Now, more than ever, we must succeed in eliminating Latino HIV inequities. We have the tools; what we need is collective will and a united coalition to use them.Vincent Guilamo-Ramos, PhD, MPH, NP
Director, Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health Leona B. Carpenter Chair in Health Equity and SDOH
Here’s What You Can Do
Protect and Prioritize a Latino-specific HIV Response
- Avert broader healthcare and public health funding cuts, including to Medicaid and HIV prevention, and restore funding where needed.
- Repeal policies that decrease access to HIV prevention and treatment or weaken the public health response to HIV.
- Protect due process and human rights, including the right to health, for undocumented migrants.
- Strengthen national resolve and political commitment to achieve an end to the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030.
- Increase Latino representation among elected officials, including leadership at all levels.
- Ensure funding mechanisms for long-acting PrEP (lenacapavir) are available for Latinos, including those with inadequate or no insurance coverage.
Strengthen Data, Tailor the Response
- Continue the collection and reporting of HIV surveillance data and improve data on inequity metrics, and reestablish paused or eliminated workforce, collection, and reporting where needed.
- Develop Latino-specific local response plans in Ending the HIV Epidemic (EHE) priority jurisdictions.
- Tailor public health communication campaigns culturally and linguistically to the Latino community.
- Meaningfully engage the grassroots Latino community in the development of Latino-tailored programs and messaging.
- Increase Latino representation in the public health workforce, including leadership at all levels.
Deliver Culturally Competent, Integrated Care
- Strengthen HIV testing, prevention, and treatment programs tailored to Latinos.
- Ensure close collaboration with local social welfare service systems, including community-based organizations, to deliver integrated clinical–social care.
- Ensure culturally and linguistically appropriate HIV services.
- Increase Latino healthcare workforce representation, including leadership at all levels.
- Ensure new CDC guidelines that include long-acting PrEP (lenacapavir) are used and scaled in Latino communities.
Fund, Cover and Champion Latino HIV Care
- Pharmaceutical companies: Invest in Latino-specific scale-up of existing and novel biomedical prevention and treatment interventions (e.g., lenacapavir for long-acting PrEP and ARV).
- Pharmacy benefits managers: provide coverage for lenacapavir for long-acting PrEP to ensure accessibility.
- National Latino non-profits and advocacy agencies: Elevate the invisible HIV crisis and prioritize mounting a response.
Eliminate Latino HIV Inequities Through Science and Investment
- Develop tailored behavioral interventions to enhance engagement, retention, and outcomes in HIV prevention and treatment among Latinos.
- Increase Latino scientific workforce representation, including leadership at all levels.
- Increase—and where needed, restore—Latino-specific HIV research funding.
Shift the Narrative, Drive Accountability
- Leverage diverse media platforms to illuminate the Latino HIV crisis by addressing invisibility, correcting false narratives, and holding institutions to account—while advancing powerful stories that represent some of the most urgent journalistic opportunities of our time.
- Shift coverage away from tropes of individual blame and toward systemic inequities like access to PrEP, culturally responsive care, and broader social determinants of health.
- Consistently use the term “Cascading Disaster” to convey the compounding nature of inequities and the urgency of intervention.
- Cover stories of Latino communities and leaders innovating solutions and demonstrating resilience.
- Center stories on Latinos with lived experience with the HIV crisis, including people living with HIV, community health workers and families.
- Link HIV inequities to broader social welfare inequities Latinos face (e.g., immigration, healthcare access, economic barriers) to show how HIV reflects systemic failure.
- Use Spanish-language and bilingual media outlets, ensuring coverage resonates with diverse Latino audiences across regions, generations and immigration statuses.
- Highlight testing, prevention and treatment inequities with evidence.
- Investigate and report on efforts to manipulate, degrade, or eliminate the HIV surveillance data essential for tracking inequities and mounting an effective response.
- Visualize the Latino HIV Care Continuum with engaging infographics, charts and interactive visuals to make the compounding nature of Latinos’ HIV inequities tangible and undeniable.
- Investigate gaps in federal and state HIV prevention funding allocations for Latino communities.
- Hold policymakers accountable for ignoring or underfunding Latino HIV prevention despite growing need and evidence of worsening outcomes.
Creating the Political Will to End the Cascading Disaster
HIV is one of many health inequities that weaken our health system and deepen divisions across our nation. Unlike many other complex public health crises, the HIV inequities we face—including the cascading disaster in Latino communities—can be solved with tools we already have. What’s missing is not knowledge or capacity, but the societal and political will to act.
Across the country, there is growing recognition that eliminating health inequities is both possible and urgent. Recent public opinion polling found that 93% of Americans agree with the goal of health equity and 71% think achieving health equity should be a top or high priority for the U.S., signaling a readiness for transformative solutions.1 What remains is translating this sentiment into action—demanding that leaders prioritize the elimination of health inequities by investing in the communities that have long been left behind.
CLAFH is partnering with the Institute for Policy Solutions to advance this effort through a national campaign, Bridging Our Divide: Eliminating Health Inequities for a Healthier Nation, that will launch December 17, 2025. At the campaign launch, we will release findings from our own public opinion research via the IPS National Health Inequities Survey—a groundbreaking annual survey measuring how Americans across diverse populations view and experience health inequities.
By leveraging public opinion, elevating evidence-based solutions, engaging leaders across sectors, and confronting the structures that perpetuate inequities, the campaign makes clear that eliminating health inequities is a winning strategy for fixing our broken health system. The campaign’s guiding principle—“Your health is my health.”—directly challenges the zero-sum mindset that pits one community’s wellbeing against another’s. In truth, when we eliminate health inequities for any group, we create a stronger, healthier nation for everyone.
This page contains AI photographs generated by Midjourney.