We are excited to announce Emily Bass joins PrEP4All as our Senior Policy Advisor, COVID-19. Emily has spent more than twenty years as an activist, journalist and author working on HIV/AIDS in the USA and East and Southern Africa. Prior to joining PrEP4All, she worked at AVAC for nearly 15 years, supporting advocacy to ensure ethical development and swift implementation of new biomedical HIV prevention tools. Collaborative action to redistribute power is central to Bass’s practice as an activist and inquiry as a writer.

As AVAC’s Director of Strategy and Content, she helped launched and co-lead a transnational activist coalition focused on holding governments accountable for comprehensive HIV programs in Malawi, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, and worked alongside feminist collaborators from the Africa region for sexual and reproductive health justice for all. 

She has also worked as a writer and communications expert for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, amfAR, HIV Plus and The Rockefeller Foundation Pandemic Prevention Institute. Her first book, To End a Plague: America’s Fight to Defeat AIDS in Africa (PublicAffairs Press, 2021), was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize and “must be on every US president’s table in the Oval Office to remind them of their commitment to continue foreign aid for good,” according to The Lancet . 

Her essays, articles and opinion pieces have appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Esquire, The Lancet, Ms., n+1, Out, POZ. A lifelong social justice activist, Emily has served as an external expert for the World Health Organization and is a member of the What Would an HIV Doula Do Collective.  A Manhattan native, Emily lives in Brooklyn with her family.

COVID-19