20 years, 4 continents, 9801 volunteers, and 561 million dollars later we are no nearer to a Hiv vaccine.
We knew this, but what we didn't know until a few days ago was that those volunteers were not only not protected from being infected but were also at a higher risk of being infected than the placebo group. About two times as high.
The two field tests set up by the National Institutes of Health were cut short after the risks to the volunteers and the futility of going on became obvious to all involved.
"This is on the same level of catastrophe as the Challenger disaster" that destroyed a NASA space shuttle, said Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, and head of the Institute for Human Virology in Baltimore.
"None of the products currently in the pipeline has any reasonable chance of being effective in field trials," Ronald C. Desrosiers, a molecular geneticist at Harvard University, declared last month at an AIDS conference "We simply do not know at the present time how to design a vaccine that will be effective against HIV.
Don't even think about what all that money could have done to help sufferers all over the world.
source: Washington Post
No comments:
Post a Comment