HIV lessons for COVID-19 (How the world battled HIV holds big lessons for 2020)

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 HIV lessons for COVID-19 (How the world battled HIV holds big lessons for 2020)

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• India's amazing HIV-AIDS response: India's management of its HIV-AIDS epidemic was appreciated the world over. Sadly, India has herself forgotten that approach.
• Key principles: Some basic principles need to be remembered in this battle against COVID-19.

1. FIRST - In any epidemic, put the most marginalised at the forefront of the response. By protecting their health, monetary needs and dignity, we save them and everyone else "above" them in the social ladder. That needs a thorough sensitising of the policymakers and health workers to the needs of this vulnerable segment. They must be given the confidence to rise and ask for help. The most shunned groups came at the centre of the debate and help - hijras, sex workers, people with HIV, drug users, men having sex with men, etc. So for the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, it means putting efforts to help healthcare workers, sanitation workers, police, senior citizens, daily wagers, and women.
2. SECOND - Do not treat the vulnerable as pitiable subjects to be helped, but as partners to be empowered. It is bottom-up, not top-down. Help them with information that empowers them and destigmatises them. Social system must welcome them. That needs humility, the realisation that no one is supremely omniscient. The poor and weaker fellows are not lesser human beings.
3. THIRD - Do not use personal notions of morality and blaming others. By blaming those who contract the disease, we lose focus on how it is transmitted. Just like in COVID-19, many in HIV didn't know they were carriers. The Indian health bureaucracy became very mature over the years handling the HIV crisis. Those experts were also in ICMR's experts committee for COVID-19.

• Controlling HIV-AIDS: That disease was not allowed to ravage India as the most vulnerable were empowered, so they demanded their health rights from the government, and got it. The antiretrovial medications that worked, were manufactured on a large scale by the government. The movement against Section 377 started soon. But despite all this, the response remained disease-centric, and failed to reform the broader health infrastructure of India (which would have been very helpful in 2020).
• 2020 situation: There are strong lessons from earlier years that must be used urgently, today. There is still time to reimagine Indian response to COVID-19 by focussing on the most vulnerable amongst us.
• Summary : India is not using its earlier lessons in superbly managing the HIV-AIDS crisis, while confronting the 2020 COVID-19 crisis.

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