Friday, May 25, 2012

AIDS Czar Colfax's 2-Month Silence

When he was HIV prevention chief for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, I got to know Grant Colfax, MD, primarily through the planning council he co-chaired every month.

He's a dedicated and educated public health official with some progressive views on needle exchange and bringing diverse at-risk populations to the table, but I've also seen him reject treatment-as-prevention theories without holding any public meetings when proposed by Swiss AIDS experts in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

Colfax is now President's Obama's director of ONAP, Office of National AIDS Policy, at the White House and we've not heard a peep out of him for almost eight-weeks.

ONAP's opening page and blog were last updated on April 4. Nearly two-months of silence from Colfax and ONAP, particularly with the very-fast approaching International AIDS Conference in Washington in July, or at any time in the fight against AIDS is unacceptable.

As a person with AIDS and an advocate on a host of HIV issues Colfax is working on, he owes me and the larger AIDS community more regular communication and online engagement. What has he been up to for the past two months?

The April 4 post reports on his last public activity:

 (White House photo.)
Lynn Rosenthal, [left], the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women and Dr. Grant Colfax, the Director of the Office of National AIDS Policy, answer questions on Twitter regarding the intersection of HIV/AIDS, violence against women, and gender-related health disparities.

Okay, a nice one-time stunt with Twitter on important issues is noteworthy, but where's the substantive engagement?

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