On December 1, 2020 at 17:00 (Moscow time) the special episode of the program To Tell the Truth, an educational project of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV / AIDS (UNAIDS) and UNESCO, with the support of the social network Odnoklassniki will be broadcast online on the platform http://od.ru/test .

The topic of the #ItsinYourPowertoLive broadcast is not chosen by chance, this year AIDS Day is very different compared to previous years, since today we are living in a double pandemic – the HIV and COVID-19 pandemic.

These pandemics have a lot in common: general confusion, fear, lack of specific treatment (for COVID-19 now, as at the beginning of the HIV epidemic in early 90-s). Someone does not believe in virus existence, someone sees in it a worldwide conspiracy. How to survive during a pandemic? How can lessons from one pandemic be useful to combat another?

The guests of the broadcast are people who faced HIV infection in the past, when medicine was powerless or not accessible, and society lived in fear and disbelief, and today, when the HIV virus has become one of the most studied on the planet, share their stories on what helped them survive, continue to live today and believe in tomorrow.

Vera Brezhneva, UNAIDS Goodwill Ambassador for EECA. Vera will share the main takeaways from her years working in HIV as an Goodwill Ambassador.

Host: Oksana Maklakova, journalist, editor-in-chief of the E1 portal

Special guests:

  • Natalya Ladnaya, Senior Researcher, Central Research Institute of Epidemiology, Rospotrebnadzor, Moscow,
  • Alexander Goliusov, UNAIDS Regional Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia,
  • Vera Brezhneva, UNAIDS Goodwill Ambassador for EECA

Conversation with the heroes of the information campaign It’s in your power to live and HIV will not change it, who remember the times without treatment and with stigma, will talk about their experience of HIV dissidence, as well as the importance of reliable information in the media to fight myths. Broadcast guests:

  • Svetlana Tsukanova, Program Manager, Doctors of the World Association, Director of Svetozar NGO, Moscow,
  • Yulia Yakovleva, peer consultant, HIV activist from Chelyabinsk
  • Svetlana Sumina, peer consultant at the AIDS Center from the patient community “Ostrov”, Novosibirsk,
  • Alexander Chebin, project coordinator at the Regional Public Fund “New Life”: Yekaterinburg,
  • Margarita Loginova, journalist of Taiga.info, author of the podcast about people with HIV “One pluses”, Novosibirsk,
  • Sergey Ulyanov, HIV activist, coordinator at the HIV-service NGO Humanitarian Project, participant of the Patient Control movement, Novosibirsk.

The broadcast was prepared jointly with partners from the St. Petersburg charitable foundation “Humanitarian Action”.

Air on December 1, 2020 at 17:00 (Moscow time) on the website http://od.ru/test with broadcast also on Facebook.https: //www.facebook.com/UNAIDSEECA