[There was a video here]

Daniel Driffin, a 30-year-old Atlanta-based HIV/AIDS activist, addressed the DNC today. His three-minute speech touched on the history of AIDS, Hillary Clinton’s advocacy regarding the epidemic (which she has a vast experience doing, brain farts aside), and most importantly, the current state of the epidemic, which disproportionately affects black and Latino gay and bisexual men.

“We know how to prevent the virus now, we know how to diagnose the virus now, we know how to treat it, and we know how to suppress it—we’ve learned all that within my lifetime,” said Driffin. “But still, there are many living with HIV...And who are most at risk? Young, gay, black men. Men like me. In fact, one in two gay black men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime if current rates continue. And if we have enough data, I’m sure black transgender women are more at risk, too. So, what do we do to fight HIV/AIDS today? We invest in research in education, we expand treatment and prevention, and we elect Hillary Clinton.”

I find that statistic Driffin quoted—that one in two black men who as sex with men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime if current rates persist—regularly shocks people when I mention it in conversation. It, in turn, shocks me that they’re shocked, because we’ve had those numbers for years now.

In 2001, the Washington Post quoted a survey of MSM in six cities that showed 32 percent of black MSM were already infected, alongside a projection: If 14 percent of 22-year-olds have HIV “a 14 percent annual incidence of infection, 70 percent of the group will have the infection by the time they are 29.”

In a 2009 AIDS and Behavior paper, a team at University of Pittsburg predicted that one in two black MSM would become infected based on the rates at that time.

In 2012, the founder/executive director of the Black AIDS Institute Phill Wilson shared with NPR a projection suggesting that 60 percent of black MSM would contract HIV in their lifetimes.

In 2013, the New York Times ran a story titled “Poor Black and Hispanic Men Are the Face of H.I.V.,” which quoted the following statistic: “Nationally, when only men under 25 infected through gay sex are counted, 80 percent are black or Hispanic.”

In 2014, amfAR shared the results of The Lancet HIV study that some of its researchers helped conduct, whose results underscored the “dire consequences from elevated HIV cases among black gay men in the U.S.”

In a 2015 article in Georgia Health News about Atlanta’s astronomical rates of HIV, Georgia Equality’s Emily Brown noted, “The reality is that in the black community, HIV is advancing to AIDS for many, and people are dying. No one is talking about it.”

Earlier this year, the first sentence of a CDC press release read: “If current HIV diagnoses rates persist, about 1 in 2 black men who have sex with men (MSM) and 1 in 4 Latino MSM in the United States will be diagnosed with HIV during their lifetime, according to a new analysis by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”

How many times must a story be told before people get it, and before real action is taken?

Driffin’s entire address was broadcast on CSPAN. Meanwhile, CNN cut away:

[There was a video here]

And so did MSNBC:

[There was a video here]

Now, this is typical cable-news convention coverage. Not everyone’s speech gets aired in full. But it’s also typical of coverage regarding the astronomical rates of HIV within our country’s black MSM population, which is generally ignored by major TV news outlets. It’s standard operating procedure on both counts, and that’s part of the problem.