Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, International Issues Subcommittee [Transcript]

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1 see it appropriately. Namely, we have the NIH, CDC, and
2 FDA, and other agencies as well. Who could possibly bring
3 about the coming together of the skills of NIH, which are
4 greatly respected, but also the skills of CDC, which has
5 much better experience in terms of epidemiology and field
6 trials and international kinds of work in various ways --
7 to bring together the requisite elements?
8 That would require two things: vision and
9 leadership. It's too important a problem to allow pure
10 science or the scientists to be the final arbiters of
11 whether or not we have an AIDS vaccine.
12 PARTICIPANT: I had David Baltimore tell me six
13 years ago there would never be an AIDS vaccine because
14 Albert Sabin, on his death bed, said there wouldn't be, and
15 I said I thought he was wrong. He said, "Straighten it
16 out, Jeff."
17 But could you dwell on the definition of risk?
18 I've been reading about risk in the '60s and '70s, the
19 difference in the interpretation of risk then and now.
20 Risk used to be getting a chance. Now you have to be 100
21 percent. That's what Baltimore and those guys are talking
22 about. There's no risk.
23 DR. MANN: Well, the problem with vaccine
24 development in general is that you rarely get a home run
25 the first time. Sometimes you do, but that's really
26 unusual. It's like drug development; you don't usually get

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