President Clinton Signs Executive Order for Creation of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS and Announces Twenty-Three Members of the Council

each year, I believe we desperately need certain tools now critically
lacking. These are: 1. a chemical product -- a microbicide -- which
women (and men) could use to protect themselves from infection during
sexual intercourse, without necessarily requiring the cooperation or
even the knowledge of their sexual partner, who may be unwilling or
unable properly to use a condom, and 2. we need a vaccine to prevent
AIDS.
Unfortunately, the efforts to develop such technologies are in a
crisis stage. The pharmaceutical-biotechnology industries on whom we
depend to create such products are dropping out of the effort, or not
even bothering to try because of a variety of formidable obstacles --
principally economic, but also legal, regulatory, and bureaucratic.
To solve this impasse, a number of respected scientists and public
health experts have recently suggested new targeted, goal-oriented,
empirical, trial-&-error approaches, similar to what was used to
develop the polio vaccine, but which, astonishingly, to this day have
not yet been tried for AIDS: The idea is, basically: that
government provides some seed money and scientific and fiscal
oversight, and works on some legislative and regulatory problems, but
otherwise gets out of the way to let a consortium of the applied
research community and the private sector get the jobs done with a
minimum of bureaucratic red tape and delay. Delay in developing
these products means lives will needlessly be lost in the years
ahead, just as surely as we all now recognize the lives that were
needlessly lost from the delay a decade ago in responding promptly to
the threat to the nation's blood supply.
Presidential leadership would be essential for such an approach
that requires bridging the public and private sectors and research
community. I can think of no greater tribute to the memory of Jonas
Salk, who spent the final years of his life struggling to develop an
AIDS vaccine using the empirical approach that has been suggested,
than for our President to declare a national goal for the development
of these technologies by the 50th anniversary of the success of Dr.
Salk's polio vaccine, which would be the year 2005. This goal would
involve the Government's reaching out to the private sector and other
nations to join in such a targeted effort, and the marshalling of the
federal research, public health, and regulatory establishments to
overcome obstacles and impediments to meet these national objectives.

Thank you.