Can AIDS Vaccines Put Participants At Risk?

By Phill Wilson, Blackaids.org

The other day, I got a comment from Jane. She was concerned that some of the people who volunteered for the Merck vaccine trial might be at greater risk for HIV infection as a result of having participated.

I think this is a very important question. It is been reported that blacks are more distrustful of medical trials, because of historical precedent.

Steke Wakefield, Director, HIV Vaccines Trials Network

So I asked my friend Steve Wakefield (pictured above), the HIV Vaccine Trials Network Legacy Project Director, who works to increase the participation of Blacks and Latinos in clinical research.

Here's what Steve had to say:

"Jane was right to highlight the news that Merck's preventive HIV vaccine did not protect against HIV infection or disease. This is the process of clinical trials; we test concepts until we develop products that work. Thanks to this process there were three new drugs licensed last year that are part of the arsenal to fight HIV infection. We will all be better off when someone -- any individual or collection of researchers and community volunteers -- help us to identify a vaccine that will prevent more people from becoming infected. That was the goal of the Merck Study.

But there is never a guarantee that a product in a clinical trial will actually work. That is why there is a need to do clinical trials. Unfortunately, the Merck product did not work. That does not mean that the clinical trial did not work.

Every time there is a clinical trial we learn something that helps us toward the development of a successful product.

There are many steps that go into a clinical trial. In the case of the Merck vaccine, there was promising data in the early test tube and animal trials. Early safety studies, conducted with participants at low risk for HIV, provided data indicating it was OK to move forward with testing. As a result, many of us were hopeful that the Merck vaccine could potentially protect against HIV infection, or prevent disease by lowering the amount of HIV in the blood of people who became infected.

In the end, this vaccine did not work. It did not prevent HIV infection.

It also did not reduce the amount of virus in those study participants who became infected with HIV during the trial. As a matter of fact it looks like some who got the vaccine may have been more susceptible to HIV infection. There is still much to learn over the next several weeks and months about why the vaccine didn't work. There is always some risks involved in clinical trials. That is why every person who volunteers to be in a clinical trial is offered and required to go thru an informed consent process.

The reality is that developing vaccines is a time intensive process.

Ten years before the polio vaccine was licensed, a leading polio researcher publicly voiced doubt as to whether we would ever find a polio vaccine. It is with this thought in mind that I believe that we must continue our search for an HIV vaccine. Had researchers given up hope for a polio vaccine simply because the process took longer than expected, the world we live in today might be quite different.

Advocacy, fundraising and U.S. media coverage of HIV/AIDS has waned as the population infected has increasingly been Black and Brown, poor, women and young gay men. We owe it to our sisters and brothers, both here and in Africa, to make sure the resources that helped develop treatments for other communities continue to be available now that we are the ones most at risk. Education of trial participants and the cry for continued testing of new vaccines must be part of Black America's agenda to fight the virus."

For more information about vaccine trials or research in general, go to www.hvtn.org

Phill Wilson is the founder and CEO of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles . He has been living with HIV for 26 years and full blown AIDS for 15 years.