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'AIDS Vaccine Fails in Trials,' Los Angeles Times
'Vaccine for AIDS Fails Test Trial,' The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
'AIDS Vaccine Trial Deemed a Flop,' Chicago Tribune
'Big Setback for AIDS Vaccine,' The Boston Globe
'AIDS Vaccine Fails Test,'' San Jose Mercury News
'AIDS Vaccine Fails in Test,' Newsday
What's wrong with this picture? In February, VaxGen, a Brisbane, Calif.'based biotech firm, released data from its AIDSVAX trials. According to the company, black and Asian participants in the study responded differently to the vaccine than the whites and Latinos who participated. The trials were the first to test the effectiveness of an AIDS vaccine. They found that the vaccine did not work overall, but it was more than 75% effective in protecting black volunteers from infection with HIV.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Tom Abate realized he had a failure to communicate when he received a flood of E-mails taking him to task for a headline that called the vaccine 'mostly a failure.' Some of his readers felt the headline suggested that only white people count.
A reporter for The [Cleveland] Plain Dealer echoed the sentiments of many African-Americans: 'The vaccine did work. It just didn't work on white people.'
'People are saying this trial failed because it didn't protect all the [white] people, as they hoped it would,' Michael Para, MD, a professor of medicine at Ohio State University and one of the independent researchers who reviewed the trial data, told the paper. 'But the company has found something worth pursuing.'
After preliminary discussions with the FDA, Abate reported, VaxGen's president, Donald Francis, MD, said, 'I think they want us to do additional field studies with African-Americans.' Francis has also said the company plans to seek FDA approval of the vaccine for African-Americans. Although the results released by VaxGen are very interesting, it is too early to make any firm conclusion about the ultimate impact of AIDSVAX on the AIDS pandemic.
But as Loretta Green, an African-American journalist with the
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