AIDS ‘Wartime Mentality’ Lacking, Researcher Says

Robert C. Gallo, a co-discoverer of the virus that causes AIDS, defended the pace of federal research into the deadly disease, although in an interview Tuesday he criticized the government’s attitude, saying, “There is not a wartime mentality.”

Gallo, who is in Los Angeles to deliver the Mautner Memorial Lectures at UCLA, was commenting on a recently issued congressional report entitled “AIDS Drugs: Where Are They?” The House Committee on Government Operations report is harshly critical of the Reagan Administration for its “appalling” leadership vacuum in the battle against AIDS.

“The committee finds (that) the absence of a clear mandate for urgent action from the highest levels of the Administration . . . has had a direct negative impact on the effort to develop AIDS-related drugs,” the report stated.

Gallo said that scientific research is “more or less adequately funded” but that red tape is to blame for delays in the research effort. As an example, he cited renovations to his office and laboratory that took more than a year to complete.

“There is no person to blame,” he said. “It is not a leader. It is not Reagan. It is the way the situation is. . . . It is a super-peacetime mentality.”

Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Institute Pasteur of Paris, who co-discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) with Gallo and appeared with him Tuesday at the World Affairs Council, told a similar story. “The response from the decision makers (in the French government) was always too late and too small,” he said in an interview.

The one-time scientific rivals also held a joint press conference and later met privately with editors and reporters of The Times.

The congressional report, which was based on hearings last April, cited testimony by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in concluding that the government’s clinical research program into AIDS had been hampered by inadequate staffing.

Fauci testified at the time that of 127 new full-time staff positions he had requested for fiscal year 1988, he received only 11.

As a result, the report stated, of 24 drugs identified by a NIAID selection committee as “high priority,” 11 of them were still not in clinical trials at the time the hearings were held.

Additional Resources

Fauci, in an interview earlier this month, noted that he had been given additional resources after the congressional hearings. Without providing specifics, he added: “I have a new request in for this year. At this point, I have not yet gotten what I asked for.”

“Whenever you have a situation in which you do not have a cure, then, no matter what anybody does, the appearance is that we’re not moving quickly enough,” Fauci said.

“People who do not understand clinical trials and the complexity . . . don’t appreciate why it takes so long to get a trial rolling,” he said.

Nevertheless, Fauci called the government’s AIDS drug development and testing program “unprecedented in its scope and its success.”

But Steve Morin, a legislative assistant to U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), said that despite the recent hiring of new workers in the government’s anti-AIDS program, “the fundamental problem is that it remains business as usual, rather than the kind of response needed during a public health emergency,” said Morin.

Dr. Mervyn Silverman, president of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, said the federal Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management “appear to be the culprits” for hiring delays that hampered scientific research. He said the congressional report “demonstrates the considerable failure of this administration to deal forthrightly with what they themselves call the number one public health problem,” Silverman charged.

Gallo, who is chief of the Tumor Cell Biology Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., cited the antiviral drug AZT as a research triumph for the institute. “AZT came fast and it works, but it has toxic side effects and it doesn’t work perfectly,” he said.

The drug has been shown to prolong the lives of AIDS patients and is being tested to determine whether it can forestall or delay illness in people infected with HIV but not yet ill. Up to 1.5 million Americans are thought to be infected with HIV.

‘New Era’ Forecast

Gallo predicted that research into AIDS and antiviral drugs “will bring about a new era that will almost be equivalent to the era of antibiotics.”

In particular, he said he had high hopes for a genetically engineered drug known as CD4, a molecular decoy that has been shown in test tube experiments to “soak up” free-floating HIV and to block infection of helper T-cells, key sentinels of the immune system.

The substance is in Phase I clinical trials at several research centers around the country to determine proper dosages and toxicity levels.

Before wider trials and treatments can begin, “we have to learn to use CD4 properly,” Gallo said. “On paper, in the lab, a decoy of this type looks exciting,” he said. But he cautioned against “false promises and overstatement” in a disease as “complex and severe and confounding” as HIV infection.

Prospects for a vaccine to prevent HIV infection are far less promising, Gallo and Montagnier said. They said that candidate vaccines created with traditional methods have so far failed to protect inoculated animals from infection.

Both scientists said that, without a cure or a vaccine, education is a key weapon in avoiding further spread of the virus.