The AIDS Vaccine Impasse: Lessons from Jonas Salk and the March of Dimes (Draft)

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greatly speed up the design and improvement of later generations of
vaccines.
Given the years it takes to develop a product ready for field
trials, there will always be newer vaccine ideas on the drawing boards
which appear more likely to succeed based on the additional scientific
knowledge acquired in the interim. But as we learned from the Salk-Sabin
rivalry, we should not let a better AIDS vaccine of the future be the
enemy of a potentially life-saving one available years earlier.
Drugs and vaccines are produced by private entities, not
governments, although the latter support the basic science knowledge upon
which such products are based. Unlike the development of drugs to treat
patients with disease, however, preventive vaccines face great economic
and other disincentives. Few companies are willing to risk investment in
vaccines, producing a relative "market failure" which requires
governmental or charitable support to overcome.
Many public health practitioners and vaccinologists are dismayed by
the NIH moratorium on federal funding for vaccine trials, but few are
willing openly to criticize the institution which funds our biomedical
establishment with $1.4 billion annually for AIDS research, including $125
million designated for "HIV vaccine" studies. One modern-day Jonas Salk
who is willing to speak out to promote his vaccine is Donald Francis, who
led successful field trials of hepatitis B vaccine in the late 1970s for
CDC, and was an early AIDS researcher at the federal disease control
agency.