Dear Colleagues,

In this week’s newsletter we first come back on World AIDS Day (1 Dec), and linked HIV discussions and publications (including a Lancet Global Health/Lancet HIV Series on Sustainable HIV prevention in Africa, launched at the ICASA conference). The theme of this year’s World AIDS Day was “Overcoming disruption, transforming the AIDS response.” Easier said than done in the current cold world. With the polycrisis worsening, “Equity in decline: fair distribution in a worse-off world” (a read from 2023) feels  ever more urgent. 

The fourth meeting of the Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) on the Pandemic Agreement   took place in Geneva this week (1-5 Dec), with the ongoing US bilateral negotiations on MoU as the worrying backdrop. The first deal was signed yesterday in Kenya. In total, Marco Rubio plans “50 planned bilateral agreements with partner countries in the coming weeks”. Also in Geneva,  WHO issued its first guideline on the use of GLP-1 medicines...