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Contributions from
the Column
Studies and reports
Development driven by technology?
So far only a vague prospect
AIDS vaccine: no breakthrough
Interview with Michael Krakowski
Poverty reduction strategy papers:
donors still dominant
Sovereign debt restructuring:
IMF proposal does not go far enough
Fresh water
Foreign investment: democracies preferred?
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AIDS vaccine: no breakthrough
The results of the AIDS vaccine trials conducted by the US company VaxGen have triggered a variety of responses. The study involved 5,000 HIV-negative volunteers from AIDS risk groups in the United States, the Netherlands, Canada and Puerto Rico, each of whom received a number of injected doses of either the test vaccine or a placebo over a three-year period. In a press release on 24 February, VaxGen claims that although the trial as a whole was not a success, the results were certainly good news for individual ethnic groups represented among the test subjects. According to VaxGen, the vaccine did not reduce the chances of infection overall but Afro-American subjects who received the placebo were found to be four times more likely to catch HIV than others in the same ethnic subgroup who were administered the vaccine. VaxGen presumes that the Black test subjects produced more antibodies against the AIDS virus than the non-Black subjects.
While UNAIDS executive director Peter Pilot described the results of the trials as encouraging, the president of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), Seth Berkley, said he was disappointed. Critical observers dismiss the purported partial success of the trial as mere chance. The Afro-American subgroup was far too small, they say, to permit talk of a statistically significant difference in infection rates. In absolute numbers, the difference was just five cases of infection.
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