A new HIV prevention injection could change the course of the epidemic — but only if people trust it.
On your morning social media scroll, I’m sure you’ve seen posts doing what they do best: spreading information that makes you wonder: “Wow, is that really true?” It might even have been on a frequent subject of misinformation: health.
Maybe it was a personal story about someone’s sister or neighbour becoming sick after getting the Covid vaccine. Or a post claiming a medication causes the condition it was designed to prevent. Warnings shared thousands of times by people who are scared or confused, not malicious.
This is the information environment into which the new HIV prevention medication, lenacapavir or LEN — the extraordinary twice-a-year injection that essentially eliminates the risk of getting HIV — is being introduced.
Yet the excitement that we now have a pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) product (medicine that prevents someone from getting infected with a germ like HIV before they get exposed to it) with the potential to stop the virus in its tracks doesn’t mean anything if people won’t take it.
