The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted all of our daily lives and upended the routines that offered our days structure, and that is especially true for Daniel Driffin, MPH. With the onset of the crisis, his life as a health consultant changed, ultimately affecting how he took his daily HIV medication.

At the time, he worked with small to midsize community-based organizations. His norm was traveling around the country to hold meetings, but he always structured his business around the one thing that kept him adherent: his lunch hour. Without this daily routine, he began to miss doses, which made him curious about newly available long-acting injectables.

Because they were novel in so many ways, Driffin broached the option with his doctor early. He credits his eventual regimen switch to open and honest communication with his provider who, like him, is a Black gay man.

“I felt empowered and comfortable enough to actually bring real-life shit to him,” he says. After some discussions, Driffin took his final pills before switching on January 17, 2022, an occasion he commemorated on his Facebook wall, where he regularly discusses the travails of life with HIV.

“I don’t know how to feel about it,” he said at the time. Since then, he has shared so much more about his journey, including images from the room where he got his first injection as well as his care providers, beginning what he called his “pill-free future.”

Though Driffin, who is 37, learned of his status in 2008 while living in Columbia, South Carolina, he didn’t begin taking medication until about 2012; at the time, the recommendation was not to start HIV treatment immediately. By the time he opted to take long-acting injectable medication, he had been taking a pill a day for about a decade.

On the day of that initial injection, he brought his followers into the room with him. He snapped images of the syringes lying on a countertop and a photo of the side of his hip, bandaged after the jab. A month later, after taking his second onboarding dose, he held a live question and answer session on his Facebook page where he spoke about his experience in frank language. He walked his followers through getting the first dose—larger injections of the two medications called a “loading dose”—in his hips and what he called a “relearning process” of remembering he no longer needed to swallow a pill every day.

“It’s a conversation for folks to have with their medical team if you’re interested,” he said in the video. During the video, friends in the HIV community thanked him for speaking up, and one person even joined the video live to ask about insurance and possible issues with doctors.

Using his digital platform to speak with others about his experiences navigating life with HIV comes naturally. He believes these types of conversations are necessary and don’t happen enough among Black gay men. “I think we need more of these ‘each one teach one’ situations,” he says. “I don’t think we have enough examples of how folks take meds and how folks stay adherent.”

This is the kind of situation that Driffin is passionate about. Given the benefits of long-acting treatment, he believes it should be accessible to all, including, and especially, Black gay men, who bear a disproportionate burden of the United States’ HIV epidemic. In his work and in his studies, he is focused on health equity, especially making sure that Black gay men living with HIV have access to health care “so that they can be the healthiest.”

He wants to see long-acting injectables available within a framework that addresses inequities in housing, transportation and employment. “I do think long-acting treatments will, or could be, an answer for individuals given the right information for them to make a logical choice.”

As someone entrenched in public health, Driffin speaks to others in his community about his life after once-a-day treatment. “I probably talk to 15 to 20 people any given month about them wanting to switch to an injectable,” he says. “I have talked to a handful of Black gay men who did make the switch, but as a result of moving or their employers selecting a different insurance carrier, they’ve had to return to a daily pill.”

The benefits of being on a long-acting injectable, he says, have been both psychological and material. “It was a sense of freedom, not having to take a pill every day,” he says.

Now, he goes to his physician for injections every other month, a routine that is much easier for him to follow. Seeing his physician six times a year for his injections has been even more helpful to him as his schedule has intensified since the onset of the pandemic: Driffin has started a new position with a national health organization and is pursuing his doctorate in public health at Georgia State University.

As a graduate student, Driffin will be working to ensure health equity for others in his communities, though in many ways, he already does this every day. For others, he speaks openly about his own HIV treatment online and tries to guide them to making the best possible decisions regarding their health.

All this is possible because it’s a journey he’s experienced firsthand. When COVID disrupted his routine, he pivoted to make sure that adherence to a daily pill would not stand between him and a successful life as a Black gay man.