And by they, you mean the right wind politicians in power.
The people who vote for them are constantly voting against their immediate interests.
If we had some sort of ranked choice, a lot of these one-issue voters might actually have a choice in their representation. Which would be good for all of us.
Maybe 30 years ago.
But in the last 20 years there has been a lot of of funding towards prevention and researching a cure.
https://avac.org/project/resource-tracking/
An HIV vaccine has proven itself to be an extremely elusive target.
But with recent developments in biotechnology, it may not be much longer before we finally have get one.