(Montreal) The Minister for International Development, Harjit Sajjan, failed at the International AIDS Conference, which opened Friday morning at the Palais des Congrès. An absence decried by Ken Monteith, director general of the Cocq-Sida organization.
Posted at 12:17 p.m.
Updated at 1:44 p.m.
“It’s disappointing,” Monteith said. Normally the host country always delegates a minister to the opening ceremony. Harjit Sajjan didn’t even make a video statement. »
A demonstration of a dozen people also denounced, during the opening ceremony, the freezing of federal funding for HIV/AIDS since 2008. “We did the demonstration in silence out of respect for the unveiling of the quilt for AIDS, which was happening at the time,” says Monteith.
At the start of the opening ceremony, a louder demonstration denounced the high number of deaths from AIDS in the world. “In countries in the global south, there has been a major disruption in treatment and testing,” says Monteith. But even here there have been problems, the number of screenings has dropped by 17% between 2019 and 2020 and the situation is not yet restored. »
The World Health Organization (WHO) predicted before the pandemic that there would be only 500,000 new cases of AIDS worldwide in 2021, but there were eventually 1.5 million.