In his State of the Union address, President Trump pledged to “defeat AIDS in America and beyond” within 10 years. Since then, many have asked whether this is empty political rhetoric or an objective that can truly be achieved.

As two people on the front lines of this fight, who’ve seen up close the devastation the disease has wrought and the progress made in recent years, we’re here to say the goal is possible.

Makurumidze is a program coordinator at ICAP at Columbia University; she lost her parents and sister to HIV in Zimbabwe in 2002. Justman, associate professor of medicine in epidemiology at Columbia University, is an infectious diseases specialist and senior technical director at ICAP at Columbia.

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