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

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1 a home run the first time. What you do is you take the
2 best product, which has to be safe, and it has to show some
3 evidence of inducing the kinds of antibody responses or
4 other responses in the immune system that might be useful.
5 At that point basically it's appropriate, and it has been
6 done time and time again, to go into humans, to do ethical
7 human trials of a vaccine.
8 You take the results of that trial. You learn
9 from the results of that trial. You make a better product.
10 You improve the product. It's an iterative process, and
11 you end up with the best that we can possibly have. That's
12 what's been done for the various vaccines that we have, the
13 childhood vaccines that we have, the smallpox vaccine. All
14 of these vaccines went through essentially the same
15 iterative process.
16 So basically the claim that the current vaccine
17 candidates will not protect is utter speculation, the same
18 speculation that, had it been applied to rotovirus vaccine,
19 would have stopped the development of rotovirus vaccine.
20 The claim that what we have today will be 100 percent
21 protective is almost certainly wrong and would also be
22 utter speculation. The only way to find out is to do the
23 ethical field trials.
24 I'm just trying to point out that it is not an
25 ethical problem to proceed. The ethical problem now is not
26 proceeding, and there has to be accountability for the fact

FREILICHER & ASSOCIATES, COURT REPORTERS
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