People who worry about exposure to the HIV virus may soon be able to walk into a Georgia pharmacy and buy preventative medicines.
Bipartisan legislation that would allow pharmacists to order and dispense or inject preventative HIV drugs passed the Georgia House by a wide margin Thursday.
Seven Republicans opposed the measure, which was authored by a Republican.
Sen. Chuck Hufstetler, R-Rome, who has a master’s degree in medical science, said he introduced the measure for a simple reason.
“I’m in healthcare, I do anesthesia, and I look at the data, and the data says this is far, far more cost effective to prevent it then to treat it, as many things are in medicine,” he said.
The South had the highest infection rate in the country, with 49% of the new cases in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gay and bisexual men accounted for 67% of new infections and 86% of diagnoses among all men, the CDC reported.
Metro Atlanta was a hotspot, with more than 50 new diagnosed cases per 100,000 people in 2023, about twice the state average, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health.
Senate Bill 195 would authorize pharmacists to order and then dispense or inject a 30- to 90-day supply of preexposure drugs and to do the same with a 30-day supply of postexposure drugs.
The Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people, said it was encouraged to see the legislation moving. “Increasing access to HIV and AIDS care and prevention by empowering pharmacists will save lives,” the group’s Georgia director, Bentley Hudgins, said in a statement.
Senate Bill 195 passed the House 155-7. It now returns to the Senate, where it passed unanimously last year. It must go back there due to amendments by the House that Hufstetler did not oppose. He said he would ask his colleagues in the Senate to agree to the changes, so the bill could go to the desk of Gov. Brian Kemp.
Should it become law, the State Board of Pharmacy would have until Jan. 1 to approve the training that pharmacists would need before they could offer the HIV prophylactic drugs.
Hufstetler said that if the measure becomes law, it could reduce misery and the need for costly medical care.
“This medicine, at about $26, is far cheaper than the cost of treating somebody with an HIV infection, which would be about $420,000 to $1 million — and obviously an improved quality of life,” he said.