Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former

health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland.

Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical

health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health

question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhut.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith Rogers, producer of public health on call. Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to

Amy Killalay, a policy expert on HIV and public health financing, about the Biden administration's

decision to budget billions to

end the nation's HIV epidemic, including nearly $10 billion to broaden access to a medication

that is 99% effective at preventing HIV, but only if people can access it. Let's listen.

Amy Killalay, thanks so much for joining me. It's great to be here.

So today I want to talk to you about the Biden administration has put combating the HIV epidemic

in the United States into its next budget in a big way. So talk to me about what does this mean? Yeah, it was it was an exciting week

when we saw the president's budget come out. And it means a few things. So the HIV epidemic has

been funded for many years in the U.S. So in some ways, we always see something in the president's budget.

And we saw increases, which we expect to see from this administration. This administration

has been very supportive of HIV efforts. And so you saw increases in both the regular

funding that goes to HIV prevention and care and treatment programs in this country, and as well as a

significant investment in the ending the HIV epidemic initiative, which was an initiative

launched under the former administration, but continued under this administration. Now, the thing

that was fairly new and I think particularly exciting was language in the president's

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