Posted on 02/05/2008 9:56:36 PM PST by neverdem
BOSTON--Two prominent researchers have bluntly assessed the depressing state of AIDS vaccine research and have urged the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to correct its course.
In back-to-back plenary talks at the 15th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections today, Ronald Desrosiers, director of the New England Primate Research Center in nearby Southborough, said he thought that NIH--the world's largest funder of AIDS vaccine research--had "lost its way," spending too much money on developing and testing products and not enough on basic research. Virologist Neal Nathanson, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania who formerly headed NIH's Office of AIDS Research, echoed Desrosiers's plea that more money go toward risky, innovative studies.
The trigger for the unusually harsh public critiques of the field came last fall, when an AIDS vaccine that many considered the best prospect in development bombed in large clinical trials (Science, 16 November 2007, p. 1048). Recapping that failure, Desrosiers, who tests AIDS vaccines in monkeys, went so far as to contend that a useful vaccine is not even on the horizon. "None of the products in the pipeline stand any chance of being effective," asserted Desrosiers, because the field is hampered by many unknowns, such as an understanding of which immune responses a vaccine must elicit. "We need to do a much better job of bringing to clinical testing only products that show significant promise."
Clinical studies receive about one-third of the nearly $600 million that NIH spends on AIDS vaccine research a year, most of it coming from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In January, Desrosiers and 13 other researchers privately wrote NIAID Director Anthony Fauci about their concerns that the field was adrift. "The letter was a good outside tweak about something that I was already thinking," Fauci told Science at the meeting here. Fauci said NIAID plans to hold a daylong AIDS vaccine "summit" on 25 March to explore how to move forward. It will be open to the public and webcast. "The real issue is the balance that we want between discovery research and development," said Fauci. "We need to take a time out."
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Maybe the feds should redirect a fraction of the billions and billions they’re throwing away on “prevention” in Africa.
Did it ever have a “way” to lose? The original outbreak of hysteria is now a quarter-century in the past. These guys are now calling for more funding for “basic research”. It’s amazing that the whole scam is still going on.
Which or what scam do you believe you are describing?
Scam? Are you one of those HIV deniers? Maybe you believe other vaccines cause AIDS or is it the antivirals or something else?
If we could get ‘prevention’ levels high enough the disease would vanish in a generation. Unfortunately people are notoriously unreliable.
Of the fifty thousand US citizens who died of “AIDS” during the most deadly years of the epidemic, 90% of them died of liver damage.
Liver damage.
Not too hard to find a cause. The victims were on a daily dose of 1000mg of the murderous DNA-chain terminator drug AZT. When the dose of AZT was reduced/removed in the changeover to the HAART drug cocktail period, the death-rate plummeted.
So yes, some “basic research” is required. My first question would be: why were 50,000 Americans poisoned to death?
Yeah, how many brochures need to be printed saying, "Safe sex, use condoms. Sex with a virgin doesn't cure AIDS".
AIDS is the African money tree - shake an American liberal and money falls to the ground. For pols a visit to Africa is a trip where generosity is returned from the giving tree.
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