At the AIDS Memorial in Greenwich Village on Friday, people lit candles for those the city couldn’t save.

“It is a reminder of who I’ve lost. It is a reminder of the situation that existed politically in this country to allow that to happen,” Javier Munoz said.

Forty-five years ago, on June 5, the CDC published a single page about five dying men in Los Angeles. For four years, the federal government had said nothing.

What followed killed more than 700,000 Americans. Over 100,000 of them lived in New York City.

“My first partner was living with then AIDS. He passed away in my arms in what used to be St. Vincent’s Hospital, and that was 1996,” Munoz said.

That same year, combination drug therapy arrived — the science that could have saved his partner. But it’s something that saved Munoz.

The kid from East New York went on to play Alexander Hamilton on Broadway, survived cancer and built a life his partner never got to see. All of it while living with HIV.

“He really didn’t have many options. He’d probably still be here with me,” Munoz said.

In 2024, New York City recorded nearly 1,800 new HIV diagnoses, up for the second straight year. Approximately 85% of them were Black or Latino people.

Nearly three-quarters of those newly diagnosed face significant social barriers like housing instability or lack of health insurance.

“We still have a lot of work to do,” Jason Rosenberg said.

Rosenberg works at Callen Lorde Community Health Center, where they’re trying to fight the battle with a once-daily medication preventing HIV entirely called PrEP. He said 8.3% of every PrEP user in the state goes through its clinic.

“Regardless, if someone is publicly insured or privately insured or even uninsured at all, we will connect you to care,” Rosenberg said.

Five hundred free prevention kits are being given away during Pride Month by the health center. Inside are HIV tests, PrEP and more.

“We have the tools that we need, but it’s all about how we use them. They don’t do any good when they sit on the shelf,” Rosenberg said.

Rosenberg and Tristan Schukraft have watched the epidemic take people they loved.

“We have the science, so it’s just about increasing access,” Schukraft said.

Schukraft grew up in Los Angeles, the very city named in the first CDC report. In the 90s, he remembers watching friends face something he had no power to stop.

“At that time, it was a death sentence, right? And so people were selling their life insurance policies, quitting their jobs. Then, all of a sudden, the medication started working, but so many people lost their lives,” Schukraft said.

So, he built MISTR, a telemedicine platform that now represents one in five PrEP prescriptions in the country — more than 35,000 in New York state.

And he said the platform doesn’t need Washington, D.C. to survive.

“We basically rely on those that are insured, and 70% of our patient population is insured. That enables us to offer the service for free to the other 30%,” Schukraft said.

But for programs depending on federal funds, there is a real threat. Congress rejected more than $1.6 billion in proposed cuts this year to HIV/AIDS programs, but next year’s budget has proposed deeper cuts.

The cuts could impact nearly half of all New Yorkers living with HIV who depend on Medicaid.

“I am here as someone living with HIV who’s terrified, because I will lose access to my treatment and medication, and that overtime will mean my life,” Munoz said.

So why, right now, with every tool available, are people still testing positive?

“We’re not talking about this enough,” Munoz said.

“People feel invincible. Young people today were not really affected by the HIV epidemic. They didn’t lose their loved ones,” Schukraft said.

“It’s all about being in the community and meeting our community where they’re at,” Rosenberg said.

Forty-five years after that published page changed everything, the tools exist. The question is whether they will reach everyone who needs them.

“It’s a reminder — history does repeat itself, that we find ourselves 45 years later, fighting too many familiar battles, and for our lives,” Munoz said.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins warn that if funding in the federal budget were ever lost, new infections could surge 73% in five years.