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

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1 worried about Hussein doing to us, yet we're not ready --
2 it's a strange analogy, and I don't know if you want to
3 comment on that. I'm hopeful that maybe if the President
4 got the word, he'd do something.
5 MR. FOGEL: Bruce?
6 DR. WENIGER: Jonathan, you raised the issue of
7 accountability, which is a subject that I've thought a lot
8 about in this field, especially looking back at history at
9 other vaccines and other problems. When I put that piece
10 in the New York Times a year ago on this subject, I had an
11 opportunity a week later to meet with Dr. Phil Levy,
12 Assistant Secretary, and I said to him that I thought it
13 was scandalous that 10 or 15 years -- at that time it was
14 about 13 years into this epidemic, you could not point to
15 any one official, senior official in this government whose
16 sole job responsibility was to develop an AIDS vaccine and
17 who had sufficient technical experience, financial
18 resources, staff resources, contracting authority, whatever
19 it took.
20 Our committee later this afternoon will be
21 talking about our recommendations, and when we look at the
22 existing effort, we have Dr. Baltimore, a committee of
23 outside advisors, like our panel is a committee of outside
24 advisors to the government. He has a full-time job running
25 Cal Tech. They're planning to create an AIDS vaccine
26 center of only the intramural scientists at NIH, whereas we

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