HIV Vaccine Funding: 'Enough is Enough,' Says AHF in Baltimore Sun

US' Largest AIDS Group Calls for Funding Suspension After Trial Failures

WASHINGTON, March 23 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In a Baltimore Sun opinion
piece today (http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-
op.aidsvaccine23mar23,0,3426636.story), AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF)
called for the suspension of costly HIV vaccine research funding and the re-
allocation of resources into effective, proven HIV/AIDS prevention, testing
and treatment strategies.
Co-authored by Dr. Homayoon Khanlou, AHF's Chief of Medicine/U.S. and
Michael Weinstein, AHF's President, the op ed, "Enough is Enough," has been
published on the eve of the HIV Vaccine Summit assembled by the director of
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony
Fauci and scheduled for this upcoming Tuesday, March 25th in Bethesda,
Maryland. This meeting of top leaders in the field is being convened at the
urging of members of the scientific community concerned by the overall HIV
vaccine funding strategy in the wake of a string of recent, highly publicized
trial failures. The text of AHF's opinion editorial is below:
Enough is Enough
Instead of continuing to squander hundreds of millions of dollars on a
futile quest for an HIV vaccine, focus AIDS spending on prevention, testing
and treatment
By Homayoon Khanlou and Michael Weinstein
To control AIDS, funding must be invested in strategies that work:
effective prevention efforts, routine testing and universal access to
treatment - and not spent on expensive vaccine research that over 20 years has
yielded little of promise other than discovering how not to make an AIDS
vaccine.
The latest round of vaccine trial failures (including a large-scale Merck
trial halted when the vaccine turned out to have possibly increased subjects'
risk of acquiring HIV) has added to a growing consensus in the scientific
community that an AIDS vaccine is a decade or more away, if one can be
developed at all.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases (NIAID), recently stated: "We have to leave open the
possibility ... that we might never get a vaccine for HIV." That view was
shared by leading AIDS expert David Baltimore, who conceded last month that
the scientific community is no closer now to discovering an HIV vaccine than
it was 20 years ago.
Twenty years of research and the fact remains: a vaccine against a
retrovirus, the family of viruses HIV belongs to, has never been successfully
developed. It is highly unlikely that there will be an AIDS vaccine -
certainly not by any current standard definition of the word.
Despite this record of failure, public-sector funding for HIV vaccine
research has progressively increased, more than doubling between 2000 and 2006
from $327 million to $854 million.
Meanwhile, funding for HIV/AIDS care in the U.S. has flat-lined. And
around the world millions are dying for lack of access to a 5-cent condom, a
$15 HIV test or antiretroviral therapy costing as little as 50 cents a day.
It is time to stop the waste.
We already know what a successful AIDS control program looks like:
effective prevention, routine testing and access to treatment. Government
funding of AIDS vaccine research should be ended and this money put to more
productive, and lifesaving, uses. If funding being poured into HIV vaccine
research were applied to these strategies, much could be achieved.
Though undiagnosed HIV infection is responsible for most new cases,
routine testing is still far from reality in the U.S. or abroad. It is
estimated that one quarter of the over one million Americans living with
HIV/AIDS are unaware they are infected; if the majority of the 250,000
undiagnosed cases were diagnosed over the next five years, new infections
could be reduced by as much as 50 percent. Likewise, for the estimated 20
million people in the world who are positive but do not know it. Applying $1
billion toward the rapid scale-up of HIV testing worldwide would likely
prevent millions of new infections.
Achieving universal access to treatment would make the most significant
contribution to a drop in AIDS deaths and in HIV transmission rates worldwide.
Due largely to programs such as PEPFAR (the President's Emergency Plan for
AIDS Relief), 2 million people in the developing world are receiving treatment
- a tremendous feat. However, this is only a small fraction of those who need
it and who will die without it. A billion dollars a year in vaccine research
funding will do nothing to prevent that.
Bolstering the case for increasing access to treatment: a recent study
conducted by the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention indicates
that AIDS drugs render an HIV-positive person significantly less infectious.
The study of married couples, conducted over three years in Uganda, assessed
the long-term of effect of antiretroviral treatment on HIV transmission.
Results demonstrate up to a 90 percent reduction in the likelihood that an
HIV-positive husband will infect his or her partner if the infected person is
receiving prevention counseling services and antiretroviral drug treatment.
Inhibiting the virus' ability to replicate, the antiretroviral drugs lower
what is known as the viral load in a person's system, often to such a degree
that the virus, while not eliminated, becomes undetectable. Scale-up of
treatment worldwide must be our highest priority.
On Tuesday, Dr. Fauci will convene a summit of top leaders in Bethesda to
"rethink strategy and perhaps plot new directions for the flow of federal tax
dollars" for HIV vaccine research. Their course should be clear.
Suspending U.S. funding for an HIV vaccine and investing in strategies
that save lives and stop new infections is the wisest and most effective use
of limited public resources. And with thousands of lives lost daily because
people around the world lack access to proven, effective and relatively
inexpensive prevention and treatment options, it is also the only moral
choice.
Dr. Homayoon Khanlou is chief of medicine in the U.S. for the AIDS
Healthcare Foundation, the nation's largest nonprofit HIV/AIDS organization
and a global healthcare provider. Michael Weinstein is president of the
foundation.
About AHF
AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) is the US' largest non-profit HIV/AIDS
organization. AHF currently provides treatment, care and support services to
more than 65,000 individuals in 20 countries worldwide in the US, Africa,
Latin America/Caribbean and Asia. Additional information is available at
www.aidshealth.org
SOURCE AIDS Healthcare Foundation

Ged Kenslea, Communications Director, AIDS Healthcare Foundation,
+1-323-860-5225 work, +1-323-791-5526 mobile, gedk@aidshealth.org, or Lori
Yeghiayan, Associate Director of Communications, AIDS Healthcare Foundation,
+1-323-860-5227 work, +1-323-377-4312 mobile, lori.yeghiayan@aidshealth.org