Somebody call Hasina

Amid the mostly depressing HIV headlines of recent times, concerned as they mainly are with the deadly impacts of donor defunding, South Africa’s imminent roll-out of a twice-yearly HIV prevention injection called lenacapavir (LEN) has been a spot of bright light. Staff in 360 healthcare facilities spread across the country stand trained and ready to receive and administer the drug, which has been found to be near perfectly successful in preventing HIV when administered twice yearly, attracting cliches like “game-changer”, “groundbreaking” and “new dawn”, although contrarian voices warn that the public benefit of rapid LEN roll-outs in African contexts is far from clear. Now is not the time to drop the ball, to use another cliché, but many in the HIV space take comfort in the knowledge that the person responsible is Hasina Subedar, the health department’s senior technical adviser in HIV prevention. Getting Subedar to give an interview took some convincing (she eschews the limelight) but she ultimately took a call on a Saturday afternoon in late April, with LEN all but ready to launch. After some connectivity issues — “Is this better? Hang on, I’ll move closer to the modem. Hello, Hello, He-LO-HO … ” — Subedar tries to minimise the achievement. “It’s not my first, um … ” “Rodeo?” I interject, with too much enthusiasm. “Roll-out!” Before LEN, Subedar oversaw the roll-out of a once-a-day HIV prevention pill (a form of pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP medication) for HIV-negative South Africans wanting to protect themselves against infection, becoming, former health department director-general Yogan Pillay told me, “one of the most experienced people in understanding PrEP provision and one of its leading advocates”. When I exclaim about the responsibility she shoulders, Subedar chuckles and says: “I don’t get stressed easily. I am on a high all the time. I just have to keep moving and things have to run like clockwork.” She works from 6am to 11pm every day and typically