No AIDS Vaccine Seen This Century : Koop Prediction Based on Availability for Widespread Use
Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, saying “vaccines take a long time to develop,” predicted Sunday that an AIDS vaccine will not be available for widespread use until the next century.
“It took 19 years to develop the vaccine against hepatitis B after we knew where the virus was, (and) this is a much more complicated virus than that,” he said.
Although scientists attending an international conference here last week said an AIDS vaccine may come earlier--perhaps in the mid-1990s--and that limited tests on humans will probably begin in the United States before the end of this year, Koop said he does not believe that a vaccine “is in the cards for this century.”
French Experiment Noted
Referring to Dr. Daniel Zagury, a French immunologist who recently injected himself with an experimental AIDS vaccine, Koop said: “The mere fact that somebody is testing it on himself, or you hear that we’re doing preliminary tests, means we’re doing the very earliest preliminary tests.” The day a “vaccine (is) available for use is a long way down the pike.”
Speaking on the CBS television program “Face the Nation,” Koop also stressed that the deadly disease, which has been largely confined thus far in this country to homosexual and bisexual men and intravenous drug users, “has now gone over into the heterosexual community.”
“Although there are only 4% of those who have AIDS now that are heterosexual, that number is going to mount,” he said. “The way we say it is that by 1991, AIDS itself will increase about ninefold, but heterosexual AIDS will increase about twentyfold.”
Avoiding Infection
The surgeon general and other experts emphasized the importance of educating the public about how to avoid becoming infected with the virus that causes AIDS and how to prevent transmitting it to others. Koop, however, defended the allocation of $80 million in federal money for AIDS education this year, while Dr. Harvey Fineberg, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, said it is not nearly enough.
“In my opinion, we’re not even close,” said Fineberg, also appearing on the program. “That amount of money is less money than one company, Procter & Gamble, spent to market two new products, liquid Tide and Crest tartar-control formula.”
Koop, on the other hand, said: “We’re using about a quarter of our AIDS budget for education, and inasmuch as the budget’s gone up every year, I see that as a hopeful sign, and I think we can make do with the money we have.”
He was asked whether the AIDS education process would be helped if President Reagan, who has remained publicly silent on the AIDS epidemic, would speak to American young people on the subject.
‘Keep Hammering Away’
“I don’t know whether young people would believe the President on a health matter any more than they believe the surgeon general,” Koop replied. “I just think we have to keep hammering away at it. It’s a repetitive message, but it’s life-saving.”
Fineberg also defended the Food and Drug Administration, which has been under attack recently for not making experimental AIDS drugs more accessible to AIDS patients. The FDA, in fact, has placed all AIDS drugs on an accelerated regulatory pace and last week licensed the first such drug, AZT, for marketing.
“I don’t believe the FDA is dragging its feet,” Fineberg said. “The FDA has a strong orientation toward protecting the public, including patients with AIDS, against bad drugs. We think of AZT as a success. We forget an earlier drug called suramin that turned out to be a terrible and dismal failure.”
Tests using suramin on AIDS patients were discontinued last year after researchers determined that the drug had worsened their condition.
“I do believe that the FDA could move more effectively in making available drugs in proper testing situations to apply to patients with AIDS,” Fineberg added. “We need, in other words, to make the drugs more widely available, but in a context where we learn about how effective they are in a scientifically controlled fashion.”
Gay Rights Spokesmen
Thomas Stoddard, executive director of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay rights organization, and Fred Wolf, AIDS coordinator for the Colorado Department of Health, also appeared on the program to debate Colorado’s policies on AIDS reporting.
That state requires a list be kept of all the names of those who test positive for infection with the AIDS virus, and traces the sexual contacts of those people.
Wolf said Colorado has an excellent record of protecting the confidentiality of those who voluntarily undergo the AIDS antibody test, which determines whether a person has been exposed to the virus, not whether that individual will develop AIDS. Those who test positive, however, are presumed to be infected and infectious to others.
Stoddard said that many people give false names in Colorado because “they are afraid of having their name and address kept on a file, quite understandably.”
He added: “In the context of AIDS, discrimination can be rampant.”
