Emotional Bidens commemorate World AIDS Day at the White House

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden held an emotional commemoration for World AIDS Day at the White House on Sunday, expressing empathy with families who have lost loved ones and telling them they “felt a special obligation to use this sacred place to ensure everyone is seen.”

Behind the Bidens, a giant red ribbon hung on the South Portico and the AIDS Memorial Quilt was placed across the South Lawn. The quilt now with 50,000 panels with 110,000 names and weighs 54 tons. This was the first time it has been displayed on the lawn.

“Like the first threads of this quilt… this movement is fully woven into the fabric and history of America,” Biden said. “Shining a light on the memory and the legacy of all the sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, moms and dads, partners and friends who have lost, we've lost to this terrible disease.”

The president and first lady were emotional throughout the event, with the president appearing to occasionally wipe tears from his face during Jill Biden’s remarks and the first lady choking up as she spoke in front of survivors, their families and advocates.

“And though we are strangers, we know untellable truths about one another that we will spend the rest of our lives longing for a face that's gone forever,” Jill Biden said, having to pause for a moment. “And that when they left our world, they took a light inside us with them.”

“As I look at this beautiful quilt with its bright colors, the names in big block letters, renderings of lives and loves, I see it as a mom, and I think of the mothers who stitched their pain into a patchworked panel so the world would remember their child not as a victim of a vicious disease, but as a son who had played in the high school jazz band, as a child, who grew up to proudly serve our nation in uniform, as the daughter whose favorite holiday was Christmas,” she continued.

President Biden is no stranger to grief and often references his own loss during similar events. On Sunday he acknowledged that though the ceremony was a celebration of those lives lost, “they bring back all the memories.”

“They're hard. It's not easy. It's important, but it's not easy.”

He said the White House ceremony sends a “clear message” to the world that the U.S. stands united in the fight against the epidemic.

“Together, we honor the spirit of resilience and the extraordinary strength of people, families and communities affected by HIV/AIDS. Including nearly 40 million people living with HIV around the world today,” he said.

Biden pointed out the “stigma of misinformation” and failures of the U.S. government to act when the epidemic was raging, saying it “compounded pain and trauma for a community watching a generation of loved ones and friends perish.”

“It was horribly, horribly wrong,” he said.

Biden highlighted the progress that’s been made under his administration in the fight against HIV/AIDS and fighting the stigma of discrimination against the HIV community. He also called attention to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who attended the event, for his leading efforts to advance the fight over his career.

As he prepared to leave for Africa in the evening, Biden credited former President George W. Bush for creating PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which has improved outcomes for people living with HIV on the African continent and saved more than 26 million lives globally.

Biden said he plans to call on Congress to pass a five-year PEPFAR reauthorization to sustain this progress before he leaves office in January.