Badpuppy Gay Today

Tuesday, 03 June 1997

Dr. Charles Farthing, medical director of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in Los Angeles, is publicly discussing a radical strategy for bypassing regulatory agencies and hospital committees while hastening knowledge of a promising new vaccine.

The strategy involves recruiting doctor-subjects, willing volunteers who would be injected with a mutated form of HIV that has already been tested (with close similarities to human tests projected) on two monkeys with what is regarded as an astounding success. The simian vaccine protected the immune systems of the monkeys.

The issues surrounding the safety hazards of inoculating human test subjects have thrown doctors--nationwide-- into two disparate camps. One is adamantly opposed to human testing. The other wants it to begin immediately. Dr. Charles Farthing stands in this latter group, on the AIDS-as-an-emergency-mega-crisis side of the debate

The American Foundation for AIDS Research says that the need for a vaccine is now more desperate than ever. It is agreed by health officials that as many as 29 million worldwide have now been infected with HIV. Many living with AIDS in Africa, Latin America and Asia are so poor, and AIDS drugs are proving so expensive, that politically-crafty apologists for the pharmaceutical industry seem to have already written-off mobilizing to provide dying people in other lands with assistance.

ACT UP and other AIDS activists have critiqued the current push for vaccines partly on the grounds that AIDS is now becoming a multi-billion dollar industry like cancer. Also, like cancer, it is one for which various vaccines appear on the market, help support and sustain a continuing AIDS industry, but in which a cure has been relegated--because of enormous profits--to a back burner. The Clinton administration's new focus on preventive vaccines, believe ACT UP spokespersons, is a way of writing-off people who are already infected.

Rumors are presently rampant among AIDS lobbyists and their friends that a budget deal downgrading AIDS as a financial priority has been secretly struck by the Democratic president in cahoots with Republican congressmen. All this has occurred behind the backs of AIDS-organizations, it is said. Richard Socarides, the White House special assistant who serves as Clinton's liaison to the gay community denies this persistent rumor vehemently. "There is not a grain of truth to the notion that we struck a deal that will abandon these AIDS programs as a priority," he insists.

Washington, D.C's. ACT UP founders are complaining--along with more mainstream AIDS organizations-- not only about the paucity of the Administration's AIDS spending, but that one "major" Clinton promise of an "emergency" AIDS measure costs just as little--$17 million--as was spent researching a space-drink, Tang, for astronauts.

Therefore, proponents of vaccines are much under suspicion in AIDS-savvy circles. And though Dr. Farthing's bold suggestion--calling on fellow physicians to be test-subjects--might threaten to throw a curve ball into such suspicions, this curve can not really be tossed until doctor-test-subject-volunteers do come forward.

Nor, until May 31, did the Clinton administration seem to address plights of the poor and uninsured already struggling with AIDS by proposing government funding through Medicaid for protease inhibitors as well as drugs increasingly deemed effective--for many but not all. White House officials and Federal health officials do not intend to ask Congress for the funds needed because, they say, they already have the authority to disperse them. Vice-president Al Gore, who was responsible for requesting a Department of Health and Human Services study, said that the results of reading the study led to the Administration's proposal. "Our view is that getting these drugs to people earlier won't cost more in the long run. It may even save money. It will certainly save lives.

Meanwhile, the president's plan--to encourage vaccines and pharmaceutical research, has been highlighted by Harvard's New England Regional Primate Center where, in 1991, 71-88 and 255-88, two macaque monkeys, were given a shot of simian SIV 1,000 times what it takes to cause an infection. The monkeys were saved, it is believed, by an experimental vaccine-- the SIV virus itself, missing 9 genes. The virus' ability to make copies of itself was thereby thwarted. Two other monkeys who got lower doses of the simian virus, also remained healthy.

Human research would require injecting HIV, minus 9 identical genes, into a volunteer. Though many lives would be saved, it is this step--fraught with imagined dangers for the volunteers--that is provoking inter-discipline controversies. Tests on only a few subjects will be insufficient as proof of the vaccine's safety if a social policy requiring mass vaccinations is to be considered.

On the basis of monkey testing alone some suspect that what is good for the monkey will not be good for his cousin. This objection has been met in human terms by two significant corroborating studies, one on 5 hemophiliacs who survived the virus, though infected, because they were missing the specific genes which the similar simian vaccine also lacked. Another case--that of 7 survivors infected by transfusions in Australia--found that the survivors also carried a strain of HIV missing the particular genes.

The president's call for a decade-long vaccine-discovery struggle matches the time-table given by pharmaceutical researchers calling for extreme caution. Doctors who fear waiting through another decade for a vaccine, point to the catastrophic numbers who will join the already 29-million infected.