Daniel Driffin takes off his blue tweed blazer and lays it on a table so he can ease into a conversation that keeps him in motion. The nearby buffet table is crowded with plentiful trays of fried chicken, mac and cheese, collard greens, candied yams, and pound cake. There’s a festive feel to this gathering at the Hope Center in Macon, a clinic for people living with HIV. A kind of instant camaraderie. This is a safe space for asking questions, learning, and keeping it real.
In this era of the HIV epidemic, talking saves lives. It pierces stigma and turns ordinary conversation into something lifesaving. Driffin, an Atlanta-based HIV activist and project manager with the international nonprofit the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, talks a lot. Armed with a PhD in public heath, he speaks on expert advisory panels and directly to people with HIV—both online and in person. In 2025, ongoing dialogue became more critical than ever. President Donald Trump committed to ending the HIV epidemic in his first term with a surge of new money for prevention, but in his second term, he disrupted the public health framework needed to wage that fight.
So here is Daniel Driffin, 39, with his own strategies. He believes he can build a new public health paradigm from the bottom up, based on the needs and fears and ideas of people like those in this room. The nonprofit start-up he cofounded, the Public Health Innovation Lab (PHIL), doesn’t rely on government funding but instead raises money for an independent model of HIV prevention, built for and by people who are HIV-positive and their advocates.
At the event, all eyes are on him: Dynamic and young, he’s wearing a black button-down shirt, black jeans, and Air Jordan 1 Nikes. His hair is styled in a high-top fade, and glasses frame his baby face. “We’re just going to vibe off each other,” he says to the attendees, starting off with ground rules of respect and, as he frequently does, a personal statement. “So, I’ve been living with HIV since 2008 . . .” He mentions that during Covid he missed some doses of his pills and switched to bimonthly injectable therapy. “No more pills. Four years ago. I’ve been doing the injection since,” he says, easing into a conversation about treatment options.
Antiretroviral drugs suppress the HIV virus so that it is no longer detectable in the blood and can’t be transmitted. Powerful new medicines also protect against HIV infection, with few side effects. Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a drug called Yeztugo (lenacapavir) for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP); clinical trials showed twice-yearly injections are 99.9 percent effective in preventing someone from contracting HIV, making it the next best thing to a vaccine.
“So, we can stop it—on both sides of the conversation—but we’re not doing that yet,” says Driffin.
The people in the audience are on board; that’s why they’re at this clinic. They want updates from Driffin. But he also wants to learn from them. He asks what they’re hearing on Instagram and TikTok and at the barbershop. Hands go up: A friend got bad advice online. A friend’s doctor is unfamiliar with PrEP and doesn’t prescribe it. Friends don’t know about the risk of HIV from condomless sex or think it’s a problem only for gay men. (About 20 percent of new HIV diagnoses are among women.)
“Who are the trusted messengers to talk about HIV?” Driffin prompts.
“Ourselves,” someone says tentatively.
“You are? Why you? Tell me more about that.”
“Because we live it,” a woman says.
• • •
In Daniel Driffin’s new imagining of HIV prevention, more people would know the facts and follow advice—to take PrEP, get tested, find a trusted health provider, and stick with treatment. Here is why that matters: HIV is still spreading, despite all the medical advances, and it disproportionately affects the Black community. In 2023, the latest data available, Atlanta had the seventh-highest rate of new HIV diagnoses among 35 major U.S. cities—and the other six were in the South, according to AIDSVu, an online data-mapping tool coordinated by Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health.
That year, 2,359 Georgians learned that they are HIV-positive. One in five were not diagnosed until the late stage of HIV/AIDS, when the virus attacks the immune system and allows life-threatening infections to take hold. Georgia has a higher rate of new diagnoses than any other state, second only to Washington, D.C.
That was before an interruption in federal support. In early 2025, Trump froze grant funds with a stated goal of rooting out “waste, fraud, and abuse”—the mission of the Department of Government Efficiency. The money was released but funding delays persisted. Subsequent layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) eliminated most staff in 5 of 10 branches in the Division of HIV Prevention, including the entire communications team, which coordinated awareness campaigns such as Let’s Stop HIV Together. Most of those positions were ultimately reinstated, but the communications cuts remained.
In 2023, HIV was an underlying cause in the deaths of 4,496 Americans. In that year, of the 858 Georgians who died of HIV/AIDS, 578 were Black, state public health data shows. That reflects systemic barriers to care such as poverty, housing instability, limited access to healthcare, and stigma, says Georgia Department of Public Health spokesperson Nancy Nydam Shirek, who told Atlanta by email that the state is ramping up its community-based outreach to reach people at the highest risk.
Photograph by Kendrick Brinson
The state’s HIV prevention and treatment services are funded through federal grants. If there are fewer federal resources to bring people into treatment or promote preventive medicines, “we’re going to see more people getting sick and dying from HIV,” says Dr. Colleen Kelley, an HIV expert and professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine.
Ironically, cuts could end up costing a lot of money. A 3 percent annual decline in the use of PrEP medications would lead to 8,618 additional infections over a decade, with an estimated $3.6 billion lifetime cost to treat those infections, according to a 2025 study authored by Emory University professor Patrick S. Sullivan in JAMA Network Open, a publication of the American Medical Association.
In January 2026, on the brink of a government shutdown, Congress reached a bipartisan compromise. Although the Trump administration and the House proposed budgets that ended the CDC’s core HIV prevention programs, the fiscal year 2026 budget provides full funding. Yet uncertainty about the future of federal support lingers. (In February, the Trump administration rescinded $600 million in CDC HIV prevention funds to four Democrat-led states.)
Driffin and Leisha McKinley-Beach, a longtime advocate for HIV prevention with a master’s in public health, want to wage a fight against the HIV epidemic that bypasses politics and finds new ways to reach people at risk. “Let’s reimagine how we do prevention work,” says McKinley-Beach. “Let’s reimagine how we do care and treatment work.”
In December 2025, they launched PHIL, which raises money ($50,000 at press time) from philanthropies, corporations, churches, and individual donors to create a system of microgrants for HIV prevention—from the community, for the community. They have no illusions of supplanting government support for HIV prevention (the CDC provided $42 million in grants for HIV prevention and care in Georgia in fiscal year 2024). Instead, they aim to help people at risk who have remained out of reach of traditional public health efforts. A work group of HIV advocates is drafting guidelines for nonprofits that want to apply for PHIL grants. “This has never been done before,” McKinley-Beach says. “We are on unchartered waters.”
• • •
As with so many eureka moments, the idea for PHIL was spurred by a wake-up call. On the morning of May 19, 2025, Driffin answered his phone to hear the distressed voice of Kevin English Taylor, a manager in the Fulton County Board of Health’s program for HIV prevention and sexual health. English Taylor and 16 others had just lost their jobs; the federal funds that paid for the prevention services had not arrived. The layoffs encompassed almost the entire staff that conducted outreach and education to prevent new HIV infections.
English Taylor, who died suddenly weeks later, likely reached out to Driffin because he’s known as a connector in Atlanta’s HIV community. When he’s having a drink at a bar with friends, someone might recognize him and come over to ask for advice. Each day, messages pop up on his Facebook from someone who has trouble paying for meds or lost their housing or is feeling alone. “People find me because I’ve been talking about HIV out loud for the last 15 years in Atlanta,” Driffin says.
Driffin got off the phone with English Taylor and posted news of the firings on Facebook, garnering a flood of emojis and comments, then sent off emails. State officials responded that they knew nothing about the layoffs; the county health departments are under their control, but Fulton had not consulted them.
Even with a swift reversal—the state made some changes in the Fulton leadership, federal funds arrived belatedly, positions were reposted, and the grant process slowly resumed—HIV prevention activities were disrupted for months. (“The Fulton County Health Department thought HIV funding would be cut and, through a reduction in force, eliminated approximately 20 positions in May 2025,” Nydam Shirek, the state public health spokesperson, told Atlanta by email in December. “Those positions have since been posted and filled. The team has been working with the community for about a month and a half, re-engaging, providing education, and testing.”)
Driffin didn’t wait for all that. He was determined to “make a way out of no way.” Within two weeks of the firings, Driffin convened a meeting of nonprofit leaders in HIV prevention. He also set up community listening sessions. That became the framework for PHIL.
“It’s the folks who fall through the cracks that we are building [this] to catch,” Driffin says. “It’s young gay men. It’s trans women who can’t share that they are living with HIV to family members. We may not hear about it in the newspaper every day, but dark days are still occurring.”
• • •
Photograph by Kendrick Brinson
In 1986, the year Driffin was born in Rochester, New York, the country was struggling to come to terms with the new disease known as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. With infections spreading—about 84,000 new cases reported that year—AIDS provoked fear, stigma, and misinformation.
But the paradigm of HIV/AIDS research, treatment, and prevention was also emerging. By the time Driffin was a teen and beginning to recognize truths about himself—that he was gay, that he thrived on helping people, that he wanted to work in a medical field—the HIV epidemic had shifted. With antiretroviral treatment, people with HIV could live long lives. Blood tests allowed for regular monitoring, as Driffin learned in high-school health classes. He took his first HIV test on his 17th birthday and made it an annual event.
Driffin was 22 when, in 2008, he graduated as a biology major from Morris College in Sumter, South Carolina, 40 miles from his grandparents’ home in the small Colonial-era town of Kingstree. The college, run by the Baptist Educational and Missionary Convention of South Carolina, was grounded in biblical teachings. It didn’t welcome talk about sex or sexual health.
Within those strictures, Driffin immersed himself in campus life, joining choral groups and, as a science nerd, leading an academic quiz-bowl team. As Driffin later posted on HBCU Connect, a networking site for students and alums, his “claim to fame” has been “being myself through all odds.”
On June 19, about a month after graduation, he went to a clinic for his annual HIV test, just before driving to Rochester for a job interview. He was stunned when it came back positive. His first thought: He had to be careful about sharing his new status. His grandfather was recovering from a debilitating stroke, so it didn’t feel like the right time to tell his family. He kept putting it off and instead leaned into his “chosen family” of close friends. (Seven years went by before he finally had a conversation with his mother. “Ultimately, she said she wished I felt comfortable to tell her in that moment back in 2008 because she wouldn’t want anyone to go through that by themselves,” he says.)
His second thought upon learning his HIV status: His dream of going to medical school was over.
In 2008, 51 percent of new HIV diagnoses nationally were among young Black men and women. Driffin felt alone but he was far from it. “Looking back now, I can see how internalized stigma or shame played into my decision of not going to medical school because I definitely thought transmission could occur,” he says. “But that’s how I learned about public health. And I think many individuals learn about public health as a result of a life-altering event.”
• • •
Driffin’s path into HIV activism was paved by survivors of an earlier era. In 1992, an Atlanta-based discussion group for Black gay and bisexual men called Second Sunday started meeting in private homes. It was a much-needed space for frank conversations about having safe sex and navigating relationships. When it outgrew living rooms, it moved to a church and later filled a meeting room at City Hall East (the old Sears building that is now Ponce City Market).
By the time Driffin moved to Atlanta in 2010, Second Sunday had waned, but some of its leaders became his mentors. “It’s on the folklore level in terms of the popularity, the impact, and the kind of work we did to affirm Black gay men,” recalls Craig Washington, 66, who served as the group’s cochair and managed a program for Black gay men at AID Atlanta called the Evolution Project.
That’s where Driffin met Washington—and where Driffin began organizing workshops and social events. “Evolution was kind of like a training ground to have young Black gay men work together on teams,” says Washington, now an Atlanta social worker and therapist. Driffin learned not just how to find his own voice, but also how to bring forth voices in the community.
Photograph by Kendrick Brinson
He became a founding leader in the Young Black Gay Men’s Leadership Initiative. The project, supported by the National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition, mobilized summits to end stigma, discrimination, and the HIV epidemic. But Driffin also cared about the personal side of the epidemic: people coping with their HIV status. He joined with Larry Scott-Walker and Dwain Bridges, friends from the Evolution Project, to cofound THRIVE SS (Transforming HIV Resentment into Victories Everlasting Support Services).
It began as a Facebook group, then expanded into an in-person support network. Through THRIVE SS, people who are Black, gay, and HIV-positive shared their stories and shed their stigma, dished about pop culture, and received help in finding services ranging from housing to HIV testing. After navigating that nonprofit start-up and a day job as a project manager with a University of Connecticut research team, Driffin got his master’s degree in public health from Morehouse College. He went on to get a PhD in public health from Georgia State University in 2023. (THRIVE SS shut down in 2025.)
For Daniel, THRIVE SS spurred a new way of thinking about being HIV-positive. It wasn’t a death sentence; it was an awakening to a new focus on health. “Inside of the group, we called those days our ‘seroversary’ . . . the day that we found out that we were living with HIV,” or seropositive, he says. “So, oftentimes, you know, those days were really heavy, really gloomy for individuals, but inside of the group and outside of the group, we started to celebrate those days.”
• • •
John T. Brooks, former chief medical officer of the CDC Division of HIV Prevention, retired in September 2024 with the peaceful thought that he and his colleagues had put the country on a path toward controlling HIV—defined as an average national rate of newly diagnosed infections below 1 in 100,000.
“It was a very simple plan,” he says. “Diagnose all infections, treat everybody who’s diagnosed, give PrEP to people who are at risk, and then maintain surveillance to keep looking for clusters of new infection and move in quickly to extinguish those before they begin to spread.”
That plan hit political reality in 2025. From day one, Trump entered office with rapid-fire executive orders to shrink the federal government. On April 1, reduction in force notices went out to 2,400 CDC employees, including about half the staff of the Division of HIV Prevention.
Then came a roller-coaster ride. Some fired employees were rehired. Others were placed on administrative leave while a lawsuit proceeded, which means they were paid but not allowed to work. Many contracts and some grants were frozen for review. Together TakeMeHome, a CDC-funded program for at-home HIV testing, was halted but then restarted—as was the Medical Monitoring Project, which guided HIV prevention by collecting information about sexual behaviors, barriers to care, quality of care, and levels of viral suppression. (Due to Trump executive orders, transgender people are still excluded from the CDC’s HIV data reporting and recommendations.)
Small nonprofits struggled to keep going throughout the turmoil. Delays in federal funding last year derailed the usual grantmaking for nonprofits conducting HIV prevention in Fulton County. The annual application process restarted in August, three months late, and then was halted and relaunched in October. Awards finally went out in November for money that lasts until May.
The consequences of this upheaval will be felt by those most vulnerable, says Jonathan Colasanti, an infectious disease physician at Grady Memorial Hospital. He treats patients who have the same type of devastating brain, lung, and bloodstream infections people had back when there were no treatments for AIDS. There’s an inherent tragedy in each case. “Every single one of these individuals that I meet that has an opportunistic infection, it’s preventable,” he says. “These are folks often in the prime of their lives. We’re losing people in their 20s, 30s, 40s. We’re losing people who should not be dying.”
Diamond (his chosen alias, for privacy reasons) was nearly one of these cases. In 2016, he ended up at Grady with late-stage HIV, or AIDS. He had been losing weight, had severe acne, and couldn’t stop coughing. Diamond was a member of the THRIVE SS Facebook site and posted a photo of himself in a face mask to the group. “It was a really sad moment,” he recalls.
Driffin responded online, then visited Diamond to help him apply for health insurance. Most important, he talked to Diamond about why it is so essential to take HIV pills every day, at the same time of day—something Diamond had often let lapse. Today, Diamond has an undetectable viral load. He cleaned up his life; he’s sober and drug-free and works two jobs. “I feel amazing,” he says. “At 34, I am the healthiest I’ve ever been.”
Diamond credits Driffin with helping to get him back on track. “Daniel overall has just shaped my mind about healthcare,” he says.
• • •
Photograph by Annabelle Gordon/ Getty Images
In 2016, Driffin became the first openly HIV-positive person to speak at the Democratic National Convention in 16 years. On World AIDS Day in 2024, he gave opening remarks on the South Lawn of the White House, where the AIDS Memorial Quilt displayed the names of more than 94,000 Americans who have died of AIDS.
The Trump administration was silent on World AIDS Day in 2025, breaking a 37-year span of annual federal commemorations. On that day, Driffin appeared on a webinar, talking about public health achievements, gaps, and needs. Among his worries: Too many people think the HIV/AIDS fight is behind us. “I can’t tell you the number of people who say to me, ‘Oh, I thought we solved that.’”
That gives Driffin a sense of urgency as he creates PHIL. He often thinks of the 135 people he counseled when they tested positive in a clinical trial back when he was a researcher at the University of Connecticut. One by one, he connected them to medical care, answered their questions, and encouraged them in their new life of being HIV-positive. That’s where the battle is forged and, hopefully, won—in the community, not in the Capitol.
“We’ve always been fighting,” he says. “That is the public health mantra. We fight for not only us to win, but others. And I think we have the greatest return on buck when it comes to winning for all.”
This article appears in our April 2026 issue.
