This week, another bold step was taken toward eradicating HIV stigma with the striking down of the Pentagon’s last remaining policy impacting people living with HIV, which prohibited Americans living with HIV from serving in the U.S. military.
Approximately 1.2 million people in the U.S. have HIV; 13% of them do not know it.
As for Americans overall, GLAAD research shows that only half of Americans feel knowledgeable about HIV, with Gen Z being the least educated about HIV. This makes HIV awareness and education prone to misinformation, creating great difficulty when it comes to lifting antiquated policies and laws around HIV which were steeped in fear and discrimination.
Today, we know that proper and consistent HIV treatment will suppress the virus to the point where it is no longer detected, and when HIV is undetected, it cannot be sexually transmittable.
This is the key message of U=U (undetectable = untransmittable).
Together with game-changing HIV prevention tools like PrEP and advanced HIV treatment options, the move by the federal court to strike this discriminatory policy aligns with the modern science of our day and our knowledge that people living with HIV who are on proper treatment, who are living with undetectable HIV, cannot sexually transmit the virus and can live long, happy and healthy lives.
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In the Lambda Legal case filed against the Department of Defense in 2022, a U.S. District Court struck down the last categorical disqualification preventing people living with HIV from joining the U.S. Armed Services, writing: “Defendants’ policies prohibiting the accession of asymptomatic HIV-positive individuals with undetectable viral loads into the military are irrational, arbitrary, and capricious. Even worse, they contribute to the ongoing stigma surrounding HIV-positive individuals while actively hampering the military’s own recruitment goals.”
According to Lambda Legal, the lawsuit, Wilkins v. Austin, was filed on behalf of three individual plaintiffs who could not enlist or re-enlist based on their HIV status. Minority Veterans of America (“MVA”) is also an organizational plaintiff. MVA advances the interests of its civilian members who are living with HIV and wish to serve in the military.
The filing followed the Biden administration’s announcement in July 2022 that it would no longer defend discriminatory restrictions that prevented servicemembers living with HIV from deploying and commissioning as officers. Instead of appealing the decision of the district court declaring these restrictions unlawful and unconstitutional, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III issued a memorandum outlining changes to the relevant regulations, which stated that individuals who have been identified as HIV-positive, are asymptomatic, and who have a clinically confirmed undetectable viral load will have no medical restrictions applied to their deployability or to their ability to commission while a servicemember based on their HIV-positive status, Lambda Legal said.
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Lambda Legal added that before the July 2022 announcement, a federal district court handed down one of the most substantial judicial rulings in over two decades for people living with HIV in two cases—Harrison v. Austin and Roe & Voe v. Austin. The rulings ordered the Department of Defense (DOD)—the world’s largest employer—to stop discriminating against servicemembers living with HIV and to allow them to deploy and commission as officers in the U.S. military. That groundbreaking ruling represented a landmark moment in the fight to advance the rights of people living with HIV. It reflected the reality that HIV is a chronic, treatable condition, not a reason to discriminate.
Additionally, in a report by NBC News, “A friend-of-the-court brief filed on behalf of the plaintiffs by what the court characterized as ‘an impressive array of former high-ranking military officials,’ stressed that the U.S. depends on an all-volunteer military and argued that it should not exclude from enlistment able-bodied Americans, including those with chronic but well-managed health conditions, HIV among them.
Link to the decision here.
Read more from Lambda Legal about Wilkins v. Austin here.
Read more from Lambda Legal about Harrison v. Austin here.
Read more from Lambda Legal about Roe & Voe v. Austin here.
Read GLAAD’s latest State of HIV Stigma Report here.