(Photo taken from “Remove Weinstein” petition at Change.org)
Michael Weinstein, the president of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation unleashed a firestorm of controversy last week after calling HIV-prevention medication Truvada a “party drug” in a recent interview with Associated Press. Now he is being asked to resign.
Truvada is so far the only medication that has been approved by the FDA for use as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), a pill which, if taken daily as directed, could be more than 90% effective at preventing HIV transmission.
Influential writer and former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan decried the comments, saying he was “aghast by that attempt to stigmatize … a medication that could prevent countless men from being infected with HIV.”
Meanwhile Eric Paul Leue, the face of an AHF-funded HIV testing campaign aimed at the leather community as well as the Los Angeles’ newly elevated Mr. Leather, took to his Facebook page to publicly ask Weinstein to reconsider his position and apologize.
Now Leue has withdrawn from the campaign and released a petition calling on Weinstein to step down as head of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, citing his disparaging remarks regarding “individuals trying to protect themselves from AIDS by likening them to illicit substance abusers” as “unbefitting the head of the world’s largest AIDS service organization,” before going on to say:
This petition is not about how Weinstein or we personally feel about HIV PrEP. This petition is about whether we, the people, should be allowed access to accurate information, free of stigma and discrimination. Since 1980, HIV and its prevention has been framed in moral terms, and the people carrying the virus blamed. The head of our largest AIDS service organization should know that HIV prevention is not “a party.”
With our signatures to remove Michael Weinstein as CEO and President of the AHF, we encourage the AIDS Healthcare Foundation to reconnect with the public to be able to continue their important work hand in hand with the communities they serve.
We ask for 50,000 people to sign this petition, and to use the hashtag #removeWeinstein to help raise awareness for this petition.
Leue’s call for Weinstein to step down joins a growing chorus of activists and advocates who have taken issue with the AHF president’s comments, including adult film mogul and outspoken PrEP advocate Michael Lucas, who wrote in an op-ed for Out:
It would be one thing if this were a talking point of a crackpot on The 700 Club. Hell, Mr. Weinstein’s words could be adapted nicely for a poster for the Westboro Baptist Church. But this man, who earns, according the L.A. Times, around $390,000 per year, leads an organization that’s the largest provider of HIV/AIDS services in the United States. Yet his views are so out of line with scientific reality that, before approving PrEP, the head of the Centers for Disease Control refused to even meet with him.
The truth is this: The latest research shows that people who take PrEP on a daily basis achieve upwards of 90 percent protection from the virus. That’s a conservative estimate. In the largest study to date, not a single person who took PrEP as prescribed became HIV positive.
The full text of Eric Paul Leue’s petition can be found here.