Trump once promised to end HIV in America. His deep funding cuts are rolling back progress in the South.

JACKSON, Miss. — Storm clouds hung low above a community center in Jackson, where pastor Andre Devine invited people inside for lunch. Hoagies with smoked turkey and ham drew the crowd, but several people lingered for free preventive health care: tests for HIV and other diseases, flu shots, and blood pressure and glucose monitoring.
Between greetings, Devine, executive director of the nonprofit group Hearts for the Homeless, commiserated with his colleagues about the hundreds of thousands of dollars their groups had lost within a couple of weeks, swept up in the Trump administration's termination of research dollars and clawback of more than $11 billion from health departments across the country.
Devine would have to scale back food distribution for people in need. And his colleagues at the nonprofit health care group My Brother's Keeper were worried they'd have to shutter the group's mobile clinic — an RV offering HIV tests, parked beside the community center that morning. Several employees had already been furloughed and the cuts kept coming, said June Gipson, CEO of My Brother's Keeper.
"People can't work without being paid," she said.
A mobile clinic run by the nonprofit My Brother's Keeper provides free tests for HIV and other diseases in Jackson, Mississippi. The group is curbing its services because of cuts to federal funding.
Amy Maxmen / KFF Health News
The directors of other community-based groups in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee told KFF Health News they too had reduced their spending on HIV testing and outreach because of delayed or slashed federal funds — or they were making plans to do so, anticipating cuts to come.
Scaling back these efforts could prove tragic, Gipson said. Without an extra boost of support to get tested or stay on treatment, many people living with HIV will grow sicker and stand a greater chance of infecting others.
President Trump, in his first term, promised to end America's HIV epidemic — and he put the resources of the federal government behind the effort. This time, he has deployed the powers of his office to gut funding, abandoning those communities at highest risk of HIV.
Mr. Trump's earlier efforts targeted seven Southern states, including Mississippi, where funds went to community groups and health departments that tailor interventions to historically underserved communities that face discrimination and have less access to quality education, health care, stable income, and generational wealth. Such factors help explain why Black people accounted for 38% of HIV diagnoses in the United States in 2023, despite representing only 14% of the population, and also why half of the country's new HIV infections occur in the South.
Now, Mr. Trump is undermining HIV efforts by barring funds from programs built around diversity, equity, and inclusion. A Day One executive order said they represent "immense public waste and shameful discrimination."
Since then, his administration has cut millions of dollars in federal grants to health departments, universities, and nonprofit organizations that do HIV work. And in April, it eliminated half of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 10 HIV branch offices, according to an email to grant recipients, reviewed by KFF Health News, from the director of the CDC's Division of HIV Prevention. The layoffs included staff who had overseen the rollout of HIV grants to health departments and community-based groups, like My Brother's Keeper.
The CDC provides more than 90% of all federal funding for HIV prevention — about $1 billion annually. The Trump administration's May 2 budget proposal for fiscal 2026 takes aim at DEI initiatives, including in its explanation for cutting $3.59 billion from the CDC. Although the proposal doesn't mention HIV prevention specifically, the administration's drafted plan for HHS, released mid-April, eliminates all prevention funding at the CDC, as well as funding for Mr. Trump's initiative to end the epidemic.
Eliminating federal funds for HIV prevention would lead to more than 143,000 additional people in the U.S. becoming infected with HIV within five years, and about 127,000 additional people who die of AIDS-related causes, according to estimates from the Foundation for AIDS Research, a nonprofit known as amfAR. Excess medical costs would exceed $60 billion, it said.
Eldridge Dwayne Ellis, the coordinator of the mobile testing clinic at My Brother's Keeper, said curbing the group's services goes beyond HIV.
"People see us as their only outlet, not just for testing but for confidential conversations, for a shoulder to cry on," he said. "I don't understand how someone, with the stroke of a pen, could just haphazardly write off the health of millions."
Eldridge Dwayne Ellis (right) and a nurse work inside a mobile clinic run by My Brother's Keeper that offers free tests for HIV and other diseases.
Amy Maxmen / KFF Health News
Quiet tears
Ellis came into his role in the mobile clinic haphazardly, when he worked as a construction worker. Suddenly dizzy and unwell on a job, a co-worker suggested he visit the organization's brick-and-mortar clinic nearby. He later applied for a position with My Brother's Keeper, inspired by its efforts to give people support to help themselves.
For example, Ellis described a young man who visited the mobile clinic recently who had been kicked out of his home and was sleeping on couches or on the street. Ellis thought of friends he'd known in similar situations that put them at risk of HIV by increasing the likelihood of transactional sex or substance use disorders.
When a rapid test revealed HIV, the young man fell silent. "The quiet tears hurt worse — it's the dread of mortality," Ellis said. "I tried to be as strong as possible to let him know his life is not over, that this wasn't a death sentence."
Ellis and his team enrolled the man into HIV care that day and stayed in touch. Otherwise, Ellis said, he might not have had the means or fortitude to seek treatment on his own and adhere to daily HIV pills. Not only is that deadly for people with HIV, it's bad for public health. HIV experts use the phrase "treatment as prevention" because most new infections derive from people who aren't adhering to treatment well enough to be considered virally suppressed — which keeps the disease from spreading.
Only a third of people living with HIV in Mississippi were virally suppressed in 2022. Nationally, that number is about 65%. That's worse than in eastern and southern Africa, where 78% of people with HIV aren't spreading the virus because they're on steady treatment.
My Brother's Keeper is one of many groups improving such numbers by helping people get tested and stay on medication. But the funding cuts in Washington have curtailed their work. The first loss was a $12 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, not even two years into a 10-year project. "Programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry," the NIH said in a letter reviewed by KFF Health News.
My Brother's Keeper then lost a CDC award to reduce health disparities — a grant channeled through the Mississippi state health department — that began with the group's work during the covid pandemic but had broadened to screening and care for HIV, heart disease, and diabetes. These are some of the maladies that account for why low-income Black people in the Deep South die sooner, on average, than those who are white. According to a recent study, the former's life expectancy was just 68 years in 2021, on par with the average in impoverished nations like Rwanda and Myanmar.
The group then lost CDC funding that covered the cost of laboratory work to detect HIV, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis in patients' blood samples. Mississippi has the highest rate of sexually transmitted diseases among states, in part because people spread infections when they aren't tested and treated.
"The labs are $200 to $600 per person," Gipson said, "so now we can't do that without passing the cost to the patient, and some can't pay."
Two other CDC grants on HIV prevention, together worth $841,000, were unusually delayed.
Public health specialists close to the CDC, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retaliation, said they were aware of delays in HIV prevention funding, despite court orders to unfreeze payments for federal grants in January and February. "The faucet was being turned off at a higher level than at the CDC," one specialist said. The delays have now been compounded, they said, by the gutting of that agency's HIV workforce in April.
"I know of many organizations reliant on subcontracted federal funds who have not been paid for the work they've done, or whose funding has been terminated," said Dafina Ward, executive director of the Southern AIDS Coalition.
To reach the underserved, these groups offer food, housing assistance, bus passes, disease screening, and a sense of community. A network of the groups was fostered, in part, by Mr. Trump's initiative to end the epidemic. And it showed promise: From 2017 to 2022, new HIV infections decreased by 21% in the cities and the Southern states it targeted.
Disparities in infections were still massive, with the rate of HIV diagnoses about eight times as high for Black people as White people, and the South remained hardest hit. Ward was hopeful at the start of this year, however, as testing became more widespread and HIV prevention drugs — called preexposure prophylaxis, or PrEP — slowly gained popularity. But her outlook has shifted and she fears that grassroots organizations might not weather the funding turmoil.
"We're seeing an about-face of what it means to truly work towards ending HIV in this country," she said.
A closed clinic
Southeast of Jackson, in Hattiesburg, Sean Fortenberry tears up as he walks into a small room used until recently for HIV testing. He has kept his job at Mississippi's AIDS Services Coalition by shifting his role but agonizes about the outcome. When Fortenberry tested positive for HIV in 2007, he said, his family and doctor saved his life.
"I never felt that I was alone, and that was really, really important," he said. "Other people don't have that, so when I came across this position, I was gung-ho. I wanted to help."
But the coalition froze its HIV testing clinic and paused mobile testing at homeless shelters, colleges, and churches late last year. Kathy Garner, the group's executive director, said the Mississippi health department — which funds the coalition with CDC's HIV prevention dollars — told her to pause outreach in October before the state renewed the group's annual HIV contract.
Sean Fortenberry and Kathy Garner, of the AIDS Services Coalition, work inside the group's HIV testing clinic, whose operation has been suspended because of delayed federal funds for HIV prevention.
Amy Maxmen / KFF Health News
Kendra Johnson, communicable diseases director at Mississippi's health department, said that delays in HIV prevention funds were initially on the department's end because it was short on administrative staff. Then Mr. Trump took office. "We were working with our federal partners to ensure that our new objectives were in line with new HIV prevention activities," Johnson said. "And we ran into additional delays due to paused communications at the federal level."
The AIDS coalition remains afloat largely because of money from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program for treatment and from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. "If most of these federal dollars are cut, we would have to close," Garner said.
The group provides housing or housing assistance to roughly 400 people each year. Research shows that people in stable housing adhere much better to HIV treatment and are far less likely to die than unhoused people with HIV.
Funding cuts have shaken every state, but the South is acutely vulnerable when it comes to HIV, said Gregorio Millett, director of public policy at amfAR. Southern states have the highest level of poverty and a severe shortage of rural clinics, and several haven't expanded Medicaid so that more low-income adults have health insurance.
Further, Southern states aren't poised to make up the difference. Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Missouri put zero state funds into HIV prevention last year, according to NASTAD, an association of public health officials who administer HIV and hepatitis programs. In contrast, about 40% of Michigan's HIV prevention budget is provided by the state, 50% of Colorado's HIV prevention budget, and 88% of New York's.
"When you are in the South, you need the federal government," said Gipson, from My Brother's Keeper. "When we had slavery, we needed the federal government. When we had the push for civil rights, we needed the federal government. And we still need the federal government for health care," she said. "The red states are going to suffer, and we're going to start suffering sooner than anyone else."
"So goes Mississippi"
When asked about cuts and delays to HIV prevention funding, the CDC directed queries to HHS. The department's director of communications, Andrew Nixon, replied in an email: "Critical HIV/AIDS programs will continue under the Administration for a Healthy America (AHA) as a part of Secretary [Robert F.] Kennedy's vision to streamline HHS to better serve the American people."
Nixon did not reply to a follow-up question on whether the Trump administration considers HIV prevention critical.
On April 4, Gipson received a fraction of her delayed HIV prevention funds from the CDC. But Gipson said she was afraid to hire back staff amid the turmoil.
Like the directors of many other community organizations, Gipson is going after grants from foundations and companies. Pharmaceutical firms such as Gilead and GSK that produce HIV drugs are among the largest contributors of non-governmental funds for HIV testing, prevention, and care, but private funding for HIV has never come close to the roughly $40 billion that the federal government allocated to HIV annually.
"If the federal government withdraws some or all of its support, the whole thing will collapse," said Alice Riener, CEO of the community-based organization CrescentCare in Louisiana. "What you see in Mississippi is the beginning of that, and what's so concerning is the infrastructure we've built will collapse quickly but take decades to rebuild."
Southern health officials are reeling from cuts because state budgets are already tight. Mississippi's state health officer, Daniel Edney, spoke with KFF Health News on the day the Trump administration terminated $11 billion in COVID-era funds intended to help states improve their public health operations. "There's not a lot of fat, and we're cutting it to the bone right now," Edney said.
Mississippi needed this boost, Edney said, because the state ranks among the lowest in health metrics including premature death, access to clinical care, and teen births. But Edney noted hopeful trends: The state had recently moved from 50th to 49th worst in health rankings, and its rate of new HIV cases was dropping.
"The science tells us what we need to do to identify and care for patients, and we're improving," he said. "But trends can change very quickly on us, so we can't take our foot off the gas pedal."
If that happens, researchers say, the comeback of HIV will go unnoticed at first, as people at the margins of society are infected silently before they're hospitalized. As untreated infections spread, the rise will eventually grow large enough to make a dent in national statistics, a resurgence that will cost lives and take years, if not decades, to reverse.
Outside the community center on that stormy March morning, pastor Devine lamented not just the loss of his grant from the health department, but a $1 billion cut to food distribution programs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He rattled off consequences he feared: People relying on food assistance would be forced to decide between buying groceries, paying bills, or seeing a doctor, driving them further into poverty, into emergency rooms, into crime.
Deja Abdul-Haqq, a program director at My Brother's Keeper, nodded along as he spoke. "So goes Mississippi, so goes the rest of the United States," Abdul-Haqq said. "Struggles may start here, but they spread."
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

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Upon release, He went back to working in the gene-editing field, though he promised to abide by domestic and international rules. The episode showed that human heritable germline editing is already clearly possible today, but not necessarily ethical to carry out. Indeed, many scientists and bioethicists believe we're not ready to go down that path just yet. For this Giz Asks, we reached out to several bioethicists to get their take on the moratorium, and more broadly, on the question of when we should be able to genetically modify children, if ever. Founding head of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine's Department of Population Health. I've been thinking about that question for well over 40 years. We didn't always have the technology to go in and modify genes in an egg, sperm, embryo, or fetus for that matter. But it's certainly the case that people have been thinking hard about trying to genetically alter and improve children, probably back to the Greeks. We know that in modern times, Nazi Germany was home to race hygiene theory and a form of eugenics; they would have been very interested in creating better babies. They did have the Lebensborn Program where they tried to force women and men that they deemed especially genetically fit to breed and have kids. It's not really clear whatever happened to those kids. But it's a form, if you will, of trying to get the right genes into your offspring and get them passed along into the future. They practiced that. And we had versions of that in the U.S., believe it or not. We actually had awards given at state fairs to families that were seen as eugenically the best and trying to encourage those families to have bigger families. That's an idea that's still rattling around today, by the way, in the mouths of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, etc. Many in the current Trump administration are very concerned about minorities becoming the majority in the U.S. In any event, these are old fashioned ideas, often fueled by dreams of eugenics, shifting the population in the future toward healthier, more competent, more physically able people, trying to get people of the right race or ethnicity so that the society's makeup is proper. They don't rely on engineering a gene. There's no CRISPR. There's nobody going in there and trying to penetrate the cell wall to insert genetic information. But those are just new ways to think about ideas that have been around for a long time. So if you ask me, will we see genetic engineering of children aimed at their improvement? I say yes, undoubtedly. Now when? I'm not sure what the answer to that is. Right now, we have some crude tools. We are seeing some efforts to use gene therapy in kids to repair diseases of their bodies, not things that would be inherited. They work a bit, but I wouldn't say we're really at the sort of utopia of being able to reliably get rid of in a person or a child, sickle cell or other major diseases. The tools, despite a lot of hype and a lot of maybe press release journalism, are not quite there yet to really say we can even do a good job repairing disease in an existing kid. So when it comes to trying to use tools to modify an embryo, I'm going to say flat out we're at least 10 years away from that in any serious way that could be considered safe, targeted, and likely to produce the outcome you want. So the big restriction now is safety. I think we'll get past safety, but it is a reason right now not to do anything. Now, what else might become an objection if we did have accurate, sophisticated tools? I think the first is access. If you make better kids, but only some people can afford it, that wouldn't be fair. And that in itself would be unjust. And you might wind up creating two classes or more of humans on Earth, the genetically engineered superior people and others. And this obviously is a theme all over science fiction. Old-timers will remember the Wrath of Khan from Star Trek for their take on what happens when you get a super genetically engineered race. There's Gattaca, another movie that explored this. But I'm going to say this somewhat controversially. Fairness in access never stopped a technology from going forward. When the rich and the middle class want it, they're not stopped by the fact that the poor can't get it. I would like to see provisions made to say we shouldn't move forward unless those technologies are available to those who want them regardless of cost. But I don't think that's going to happen. It's just never happened. So access is an issue, but I don't think it's a game-breaker for improving your kids. People also say, well, how will we improve? I mean, what's the best state? We can't agree on that. So will we really improve kids? There may be things we disagree about as to whether they're really improvements. Would it be an improvement to diminish pigment in black people? Try and make them less dark. We can certainly see that argued. There are plenty in the deaf community who say, well, deafness is not really something you have to get rid of or try to improve by genetically engineering hearing to make it better. They can get around the world deaf using a different language and different institutions. But there are clearly things that it would be nice to genetically improve in kids. Immunity would be great. We do it now with vaccines. It would be great to find the right genes, tweak them, and build stronger immune systems. It would be great to make sure that we try our best to diminish the extreme pain, that some of us suffer not just as disease, but with respect to certain stimuli. I'm not saying we should genetically eliminate all pain. That would probably put us in danger, but we don't quite have to suffer the way we do. My point being, the fact that we don't agree on everything as to what would be an improvement doesn't mean that we can't agree on anything. The last thing I'll say is this. When you try to make better kids, I think one last concern is: Are you going to make the children have less options rather than more? So if I considered it an improvement in a child to make them a giant, or to make them a tennis player, or to try and figure out perhaps some weird appearance that would make them a celebrity, I'm condemning the child to my choice. They don't have the freedom to run their own life. They don't have the ability to choose what they want to do. I tighten down their future by narrowing the kinds of traits they have. That, I think, is a legitimate objection. We have to think hard about that. Many of the things we do environmentally, learn to read better, learn to do exercise, learn to play games, these are skills that expand capacities in our children, and may in fact be values that are then passed on to future generations. But they don't wind up creating kids who are less capable because of those interventions. That's where genetic change has to be watched very closely. So the bottom line of this gigantic speech is yes, we will see genetic modification of our children. It will come. There are traits that people will eagerly try to put into their kids in the future. They will try to design out genetic diseases, get rid of them. They will try to build in capacities and abilities that they agree are really wonderful. Will we hang up these interventions on ethical grounds? For the most part, no, would be my prediction, But not within the next 10 years. The tools are still too crude. Associate professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University's School of Medicine There are children with genetic modifications walking around today, children like KJ, who was treated with personalized CRISPR gene editing at just six months old. There are now kids who are free of sickle cell disease symptoms through CRISPR therapy, the first one ever approved by the FDA. All of these children are 'genetically modified,' and they and their parents couldn't be happier about it. What other conditions could and should be treated through genetic modifications? That's a question that scientists are actively working on, and that social scientists like me are talking about with patients, parents, and communities—because we and they think it's really important for them to be part of those decisions. These 'somatic' gene editing treatments that are already being used aren't the kind that is passed down through our reproductive cells, the germline. Heritable gene modification would involve embryos, eggs, or sperm, or even possibly other cells that could be turned into these kinds of cells. A technology currently being researched, called in vitro gametogenesis, could use gene editing to turn skin cells into reproductive cells, allowing families with infertility to have their own genetically related children. And of course, there are scientists looking at the possibility of editing reproductive cells to allow couples who carry the genes for severe diseases to conceive children without those conditions. Many ethicists and scientists have drawn a hard line between heritable and non-heritable gene editing, but in practice it's not nearly so clear-cut. Off-target effects of gene editing are difficult to predict or control, so there is a chance that reproductive cells could be changed by treatments aimed at other organ systems. Fetal gene editing, which could help babies with some conditions be born with few or no symptoms, will also involve the pregnant bodies of their mothers; those adults could host edited cells even after the pregnancy ends, possibly affecting their future children too. Families dealing with genetic conditions that cause great suffering for their children don't necessarily see a problem with eliminating those conditions forever with heritable gene editing. On the other hand, some people living with genetic conditions, such as deafness or autism, see no reason for treating their condition with gene editing, heritable or not, because their biggest problems come not from the condition itself but from the way society treats them. So there are many questions to be asked about all forms of genetic modification, and how they will be developed and implemented. All the gene editing treatments that exist now or are being imagined over the next decade, heritable or not, involve exorbitant cost and will be inaccessible to most people worldwide. It will be crucial to balance the excitement of these novel technologies with attention to questions of justice, developing new treatments with an eye toward both accessibility and the priorities of those most affected. The only way to do this is to bring more voices into conversation with one another: people living with genetic conditions, scientists and doctors, policymakers of all kinds, and members of the public. Although gene editing is an amazing tool to add to our kit, the work of building more robust healthcare and support for families carrying or living with genetic conditions doesn't begin or end with genetic modification. Bioethicist, sociologist, and executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Yes we should, when it's safe, effective, and voluntary. Calls to permanently ban the creation of genetically modified children often rest on fear, not facts. They mirror past moral panics over interracial marriage, in vitro fertilization, and birth control—all technologies or choices once deemed unnatural or dangerous, and now widely accepted. We should be wary of arguments dressed up as ethics but rooted in anxiety about change. That doesn't mean anything goes. Like any powerful technology, gene editing must be tightly regulated for safety and efficacy. But the agencies we already trust to regulate medicine—the FDA, NIH, and institutional review boards—are largely capable of doing that. We don't need a bioethics priesthood or a new bureaucracy to police reproductive decisions. We need science-based oversight, individual consent, and protection from coercion. One of the loudest objections to genetic editing is the specter of 'eugenics.' But if eugenics means state control over reproduction, then the lesson of the 20th century is to defend reproductive freedom, not curtail it. Governments should not tell parents what kinds of kids to have. Preventing parents from using safe, approved gene therapies to reduce suffering or enhance their children's lives is a strange way to honor that lesson. They should give parents access to all the information and technology for the choices they make. True reproductive liberty includes the right to use the best science available to ensure a child's health. Another objection is that genetic modification could harm people who would rather not participate. But this 'perfection anxiety' ignores how all medical advances shift social norms. We didn't stop improving dental care because it made bad teeth less acceptable. And a healthier society has not led to less compassion for those who remain sick or disabled—if anything, it's strengthened the case for inclusion and support. The goal should be equitable access, not frozen norms. We do need to ensure that parents can access all the gene therapies that actually provide potential benefits for children. Governments with universal healthcare will need to make tough choices about what to cover and what not to cover. For instance, the National Health Service should make gene therapy to remove lethal, painful conditions available for all Britons, but parents may need to pay for medical tourism to some offshore clinic if they want to tweak their embryo's eye color. What about risks we can't foresee? Of course there will be some. All new medical therapies come with uncertainties. That's why we have trials, regulation, and post-market surveillance. There's no reason genetic therapies should be held to an impossibly higher standard. We should start with animal models, and proceed to the most morally defensible gene tweaks, lethal and painful conditions. Over time, as the safety of the techniques are better understood, we can expand the scope of therapeutic choices. Some worry that genetically modified children could disrupt our ideas of family or humanity. But those concepts have already been revolutionized—by urbanization, feminism, economic precarity, and social movements. The family of today would be unrecognizable to most people in 1800. If genetic technologies change our values again, it won't be the first time. Liberal democracies don't freeze culture in place—they ensure people have the freedom to shape it. Ultimately, the question isn't whether we should allow genetically modified children. It's whether we trust parents to make mostly good choices under the oversight of regulators and doctors. We should, because most parents have their children's best interests in mind, as they perceive them. That's why we allow parents to raise their own children in the first place. And we should ensure those choices are equitably available to all, not outlawed out of fear. If we ever find genetic tweaks to reduce suffering, enhance capability, or prevent devastating disease—and we can do so safely and ethically—the real moral failure would be to prohibit it. A Canadian bioethicist and environmentalist currently teaching at the University of Toronto. Well, there's a big difference between genetic enhancement and treatment. And with enhancement, I think we're nowhere near a point where we should be even considering that. But with treatment, the large ethical issue right now is something like single gene mutation. So something like Huntington's disease, muscular dystrophy, or similar diseases, could it be justified to edit the gene for that? The challenge is we don't fully understand all the things. We don't know what we don't know, to put it bluntly. And with germline editing, the changes we would be making are permanent and they run through many generations ahead. So, yes, being able to prevent deadly or debilitating illnesses is absolutely something wonderful. But having said that, you obviously don't have consent of the person who will be born, but you also don't have consent of the generations that come after that. And if there is complications or unexpected problems, you can have an inheritance that just keeps running through generations. But here's the thing with this moratorium; to what end? You can call for a moratorium, but if no one's focusing on anything, if there's no research, no planning, no social discourse, there's just a lot of people with different opinions, and everything gets shelved for 10 years. I'm not sure that's going to be particularly useful. It sounds great if it's going to be 10 concentrated years on building consensus and public engagement and those types of things, but I don't think that's what would actually happen. And also, I'm sure you've noticed, the world's not in good shape, and Western culture is not of one mind these days. And with the ruptures, particularly in the United States, there's a lot of division in Western culture of how people see things. And I'm just not convinced that a moratorium, that people would make use of it in a constructive way. It really needs a coordinated plan, and I'm not sure there is one. So I do see that as quite a problem. The other thing is, we're dealing with high-income countries. So when we look at potential for CRISPR-Cas9 and gene editing, we're dealing with a very small percentage of the world's population. I'm going to guess that it's maybe 15% to 20% of the world's population, because most of the population of the world has no access to things like this and never will. Not never will, but in the foreseeable future, they won't. And I think that's something we miss a lot of the time. And the biggest ethical problem in the world today is not gene editing. It's just access to healthcare. And this doesn't do anything in those domains whatsoever. So from a justice point of view, that is a concern. And I'm going to sound cynical here. Emerging medical technologies are not motivated largely by the social sector. They're motivated by marketing and market forces. So if people can make money on this, somehow, someway, people will proceed. And if gene editing is illegal in Canada and the U.S. and Western Europe and Australia, there's a lot of countries that don't fall into that. And you can set up shop anywhere. Equatorial Guinea or other places are not going to be worried about things like this. They've got enough problems on their hands. And there's a lot of countries out there where this would not be easily called. So I support the essence of it. And I can see why people want to do it. I'm just not convinced it's all that feasible. I think what makes more sense is just not having any germline editing until we have a larger consensus about this technology.

Hamilton Spectator

6 hours ago

• Hamilton Spectator

David ‘Syd' Lawrence, England's first British-born Black cricketer, has died at 61

GLOUCESTER, England (AP) — David 'Syd' Lawrence, the first British-born Black cricketer to play for England, has died. He was 61. Lawrence's family made the announcement on Sunday with a statement through Gloucestershire, where Lawrence was the club president. He announced a year ago he had motor neurone disease. 'It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Dave Lawrence MBE following his brave battle with motor neurone disease,' the family said. ''Syd' was an inspirational figure on and off the cricket field and no more so than to his family who were with him when he passed. 'A proud Gloucestershire man, Syd took on every challenge with everything he could and his final contest with MND was no different. His willingness to encourage and think of others right up to the end was typical of the man he was.' He played five tests for England from 1988-92, taking 18 wickets. His international career prematurely ended at 28 when he broke his knee cap after falling awkwardly when running in to bowl against New Zealand on the final day of a test in Wellington. A strapping fast bowler who was renowned for being one of the quickest on the English county circuit, Lawrence was beginning to establish himself in tests and a five-for against the West Indies in 1991 helped England seal a series-levelling win at the Oval, with Viv Richards among his haul. Lawrence also played a sole one-day international against the West Indies at Lord's in 1991, taking 4-67. For Gloucestershire, he grabbed 625 wickets in 280 matches. The England and India teams gave Lawrence a moment's silence on Sunday in Leeds before the third day's play in the first test. Lawrence became a competitive bodybuilder following his retirement and he was also a nightclub owner in Bristol. After he detailed his experiences of racism during his playing career, Gloucestershire issued an unreserved apology in September 2021, and six months later he became the county's first Black president. Only last week, Lawrence received an MBE in King Charles III's birthday honors for outstanding services to cricket. At the time, he said, 'As a proud Gloucester man who achieved his dream to play for England on the cricket field, it means a great deal to me and to my family who have supported me with all their love during some difficult times. I have always put my heart and soul into any challenge I have faced and that is how I have approached things since my diagnosis with motor neurone disease.' He was fundraising to fight MND as recently as Friday, when Gloucestershire honored him during a Twenty20 game. Lawrence was also recently named an honorary life vice president of the England and Wales Cricket Board, and chair Richard Thompson paid tribute. 'David 'Syd' Lawrence was a true trailblazer of English cricket and a man of immense courage, character, and compassion,' Thompson said on Sunday. 'His impact on the game extended far beyond the boundary ropes. As a fast bowler, he thrilled crowds with his pace and passion. As a leader and advocate, he broke barriers and inspired change, becoming a powerful voice for inclusion and representation in our sport. 'Even in the face of his illness, David showed extraordinary strength and dignity, continuing to uplift others with his resilience and spirit. He leaves behind a legacy that will endure in the hearts of all who love cricket. Our thoughts are with his family, friends, and the entire cricketing community at this time.' ___ AP cricket: