Acute Rx Paradigm Dealt Heavy Blow, While Neutralizing Antibodies Stage a Comeback By Richard Jefferys Remune to the Rescue? The immunological offerings at this year's Retrovirus conference seemed full of challenges to the conventional wisdom -- just the sort of…
Can a Conference (and an Activist) Outlive Its Utility? A Moment of Unabashed Navel Gazing By David Barr Life Without AIDS, Nearly ACT UP/Paris founder Didier Lestrade put away his Doc Marten black high-top boots back in the Mitterand years.…
January: HIV vaccine papers in Nature by Merck's Emilio Emini, Harvard's Dan Barouch. February: First ATAC (AIDS Treatment Activist Conference) teach-in, Seattle (seventy people attend), followed by ATAC/BMS meeting and Retrovirus conference. NIH cancels large phase III canarypox HIV vaccine…
Having Sired Twin Failures Hivid and Invirase, Roche Tempts Fate With High Profile T-20 Launch By Rob Camp and Matt Sharp Rapacious Returns "If 12,000 people were to take Fuzeon at $20,000, Roche would reap about $240M in revenues. By…
MSF, Oxfam Redefine the Possible, and Y2K Activist Trek to Durban Marks a Watershed By David Barr Small Piece of History The buzz before Durban was all about security. The crime would be terrible. No one would be able to…
January: TAG's Gregg Gonsalves becomes GMHC Director of Treatment Policy. Completion of STI Workshop 2000 report. FDA hearing on salvage therapy trial design. Merck meeting on promising DNA/adenovirus HIV vaccine. TAG mobilizes 600 signatures on global letter to Glaxo decrying…
Tissue T-Cell Analysis Represents Renewed Challenge to "Tap and Drain" Orthodoxy By Richard Jefferys Most Comprehensive Analysis One of the central tenets of HIV pathogenesis is that the virus causes a slow but progressive decline in CD4 T-cell counts. This…
Yokohama, Vancouver, Twin Pacific Ports, Serve as Polar Opposites for Scientific Advances By David Barr Everything About to Change In a September 1996 report for the Washington Post, science writer Elizabeth Kastor observed, "Hope is a hungry thing, as easily…
VaxGen's Claims of Efficacy in Black and Asian Participants Are Misleading and Premature 24 February 2003The undersigned community-based HIV/AIDS organizations are deeply concerned by today's presentation of data from the phase III clinical trial of VaxGen's HIV vaccine candidate, AIDSVAX.…
AIDSVAX Arbitrary and Post-Hoc Subset Analysis, Up Close "Non-White Non-Hispanic" "Black" N= 498 314 Infections, vaccine group 17 12* Infections, placebo group 9 4† *p= 0.01, CI= 30-84% †p=0.02, CI= 29-93%