UN envoy criticizes lack of attention to discovering an anti-HIV vaccine

The United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa has called on research scientists to become advocates for a vaccine against HIV, even though "the science is supernaturally complex and difficult, the exploratory investments are huge, the monetary risks are great and, undoubtedly the biggest obstacle to urgency of all, the market lies overwhelmingly in the poorest countries of the world."

In an address to the AIDS Vaccine 2005 International Conference in Montreal, Canada, Special Envoy Stephen Lewis said yesterday that common sense would suggest that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria should provide the money for vaccine development, especially involving trials in African countries.

Part of the monies the Group of Eight (G8) rich countries promised for official development assistance (ODA), however, has been earmarked for debt relief for Iraq and Africa, becoming one of the factors leading to a shortfall in pledges to the Global Fund for 2006 and 2007 of $3.3 billion.

"If that source is arid, vaccines are the losers again," he said. "The argument I'm building towards is this: your pursuit is in jeopardy. Your collective voices must be heard on the funding dimensions of a vaccine. It can't be left solely to activists. You're the influential professionals. You should give no quarter. The world depends on it."

African heath ministers, meeting last month in Maputo, Mozambique, did not raise the vaccine issue because they see research and development as the purview of the North, he said. "Africa, in their eyes, is only invited to enter the equation when it's time to do the clinical trials," Mr. Lewis said.

A vaccine would be a liberating hope for women, he said. "The millions of women in their teens, 20s, 30s who stand the gruesome risk of being infected, the millions of orphans left behind when their mothers die, the carnage and devastation visited on one sex in appalling numbers, all of this would have a chance to become a thing of the past."

While it is widely accepted that the private pharmaceutical companies must be brought on board, he said, "their participation hitherto, with one or two notable exceptions, has been, quite simply paltry."

The United Kingdom has devised an Advance Purchase Commitment to guarantee market and price for those companies which discover, manufacture and distribute a vaccine against a communicable disease that dwarfs every illness since the Middle Ages, but their projections of 200 million to 300 million courses of vaccine are much too low, Mr Lewis said.

"We should be looking at 500 million courses at an absolute minimum. This is not a time to trifle: this is a time to think on a scale worthy of humankind," he said.