PROJECT ANTHRAX
By Alex Constantine
PROJECT ANTHRAX VI: - VAXGEN'S DR. DONALD FRANCIS,
CO-CREATOR OF AIDS, THE THAI EXPERIMENTS &
THE NEXT PHASE OF ANTHRAX "VACCINATIONS"
Colonel David Franz was a cheerful
"counter-terrorist." He told ABC News on April 4, 2002
that a "lot of good" had come of the anthrax attacks.
Sad Sacks and Dreary Donnas may tremble because "five
people have died, but we've put about $6 billion in
our budget." Thumbs up. A sunny disposition can carry
one far in the military heirarchy. Dr. Franz was
appointed to the Homeland Security Science and
Technology Committee in February 2004 by Dr. Charles
E. McQueary (former president of General Dynamics),
undersecretary for science and technology at the
Department of Homeland Security.
Biological threats loomed on the horizon, the
Pentagon's viral visionaries assured with psychic
certainty. Peculiar, though ... read the small print
on the packaging and it's clear that the newly
emerging diseases and the vaccines created to repel
them hung in ... CLUSTERS.
Ingri Cassel comments, "Cipro and smallpox vaccine
have much in common besides capturing America's urgent
attention." Alas, the corporate parents of the
companies that produce "these favored elixirs for
anthrax and smallpox bioterrorism are linked,
strangely enough, to an infamous history involving
contaminated blood, the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA), and even the Nazi [ties] that the FBI doesn't
seem anxious to explore."
Cipro is manufactured by Germany's Bayer AG, and "the
smallpox vaccine's newly formed producers are Acambis
[formerly OraVax, the West Nile people]. ... All have
jaded histories. The 'Big Three' - Bayer, Baxter, and
Rhone-Poulenc - are infamously known for having
infected more than 7,000 American hemophiliacs with
the AIDS virus during the early 1980s. They admitted
foreknowledge in selling HIV-tainted blood clotting
products and settled the class action case for
$100,000 per claimant."1
Two shrouded power bases of the Third Reich, Bayer and
Hoechst, were spun from IG Farben following World War
Two. Hermann Schmitz, president of Farben during the
war (which had partial control of the Deutsche Bank)
"held as much stock in Standard Oil of New Jersey as
did the Rockefellers," according to author Paul
Manning. He wrote that on August 10, 1944, the
Rockefeller-Farben group filtered flight capital
through "affiliated German/French, American, British
and Swiss banks 'for the new Germany.'" The reserves
secured "the sophisticated distribution of national
and corporate assets to safe havens" across the globe,
ensuring the continuation of the "Neuordnung (New
Order)" for the petrochemical, drug and banking
cartels.2
An upcoming distiller of the said "elixirs," joining
BioPort and Bayer, is VaxGen (owned by Genentech
((55.6%-owned by by Hoffmann-La Roche (((owned by
Roche AG of Switzerland, also an ally of Farben and
the German Reich))).
In November 2004, the company publicized a contract
under the auspices of Project BioShield worth $877
million over five years, with the government paying
VaxGen to produce 75 million doses of anthrax vaccine.
In addition, the company is to receive $123 million in
further payments from the government in late 2007.3
And it's just one more well-hyped boondoggle if the
history of AidsVax, the company's failed HIV drug, is
any indication.
On October 3, 1999, the Times of London reported that
before VaxGen went public, "the most important
government cheerleader for AidsVax" - Dr William
Heyward, head of HIV vaccine research at the CDC -
"had a SECRET DEAL to join the company." From the CDC,
Dr. Heyward "lobbied policymakers and approved $8
million in grants for VaxGen. But the company had
already drawn this chart on his future duties, and in
January 2000, he joined ex-CDC staffer Dr. Donald
Francis, VaxGen president, who also hired former CDC
deputy director Dr Walter Dowdle to head its
influential data monitoring board."
In US v William L. Heyward, prosecutors charged him
with violation of anti-graft laws. Dr. Heyward skipped
up the corporate ladder to a VP's office at VaxGen,
but eventually confessed to the flagrant conflict of
interest, paid a $32,500 fine "and escaped a
high-profile criminal trial that might have proved
devastating to the AidsVax project," the Times
reported.
Next thing you know, on March 17 2003, a class action
lawsuit was thrown at VaxGen. The suit claimed
securities fraud after Dr. Heyward wrote a series of
glowing reports on the potential of AidsVax that
inflated the stock price but proved baseless when the
drug failed its clinical trials.
A word about those "trials": As we shall see, there
was little that was "clinical" about them. Testing of
the vaccine was sponsored by the NIH, FDA, World Bank,
UN agencies and the International Aids Vaccine
Initiative.4
The tests were overseen by Dr. Donald Pinkston
Francis, president of VasGen, who, along with
molecular biologist Dr. Philip Berman, founded the
company in 1995. Dr. Francis, 62, was bestowed with an
honorary Doctor of Science degree from Harvard in
1979. Since 1978, he has been chief of the
epidemiology division at the Hepatitis Labs Division
of the CDC. Under the auspices of the Agency for
International Development (AID), he served as an
epidemiologist in Rivers State, Nigeria (1971). He was
American "epidemiological intelligence service
officer" at the CDC (1971-73).(In And The Band Played
On, Randy Shilts's 1987 Aids book, Dr. Francis is
found on no less than 76 pages, a driven, scolding, at
times hysterical presence. In the movie, he's played
by Full Metal Jacket's Matthew Modine."5)
Dr. Leonard Horowitz, an indepenent authority on
public health education and the origins of AIDS,
writes that Dr. Francis had "intimate connections to
the U.S. Government agencies, programs and people
(including Max Essex and Robert Gallo) that CREATED
numerous AIDS-like and Ebola-like viruses during the
'Special Virus Cancer Program' of the late 1960s and
early 1970s..."6
Dr. Francis is one of the instigators of Aids, as
Horowitz deconstructs the history of the disease under
the Neuordnung.7
The London Times detailed the "clinical trials"
conducted by Dr. Francis's team in Thailand. As Dr.
Heyward sees it, "only through such trials will
further knowledge be gained". Thumbs up.
Excerpt:
AIDSVAX: THE VAXGEN EXPERIMENT The Sunday Times
Magazine (UK) October 3, 1999 By Brian Deer
... At first glance, Thailand is a strange location to
carry out medical trials.... Corruption is de
rigeueur, while police are accused by Amnesty
International of "extra-judicial killings". Much of
its profile relies on sex: first with young women and
later with children.
Since the coup, however, quick cheap, experiments on
the Thai population have been added to the country's
attractions. Dozens of projects are currently in
progress, run by foreign pharmaceutical companies and
sponsored by the CDC and WHO. With an estimated
800,000 Thais infected with HIV, Aids is the big one,
with tests of drugs, immune-system stimulants, and top
of the list Francis's AidsVax trial.
It makes sense to test products where the risk of Aids
is greatest, but my attention was drawn to potential
problems during a conference in a Bangkok hotel. The
topic was Aids vaccines. Francis spoke. And a doctor
pointed out that some volunteers in an AZT trial were
mothers from remote hill tribes. "They come across the
border from Burma." he said. "They don't speak Thai,
so there is the question of whether they can
understand enough to give informed consent."
The question was brushed aside ("They keep coming
back.") and might not have meant much if I hadn't also
met an activist from the northern town of Chiang Mai.
Despite grilling 11 people who swallowed tablets
daily, he complained that he couldn't discover even
the name of the product or the pharmaceutical company
involved. This man was a former heroin user, so I
asked him where VaxGen was recruiting. "Go to Khlong
Toei," he said. "By Port Authority Building. That's
where they'll get people for the trial."
Khlong Toei is a slum; a sewage-stinking wasteland; a
cauldron of disease and drug use. The better-off live
in concrete hutches, with wire-fenced windows and
balconies. Next down in the social scale are
wooden-shack coops on plots of flood-prone ground.
Then there are kennels: festering shantytown alleys of
plank, sheet-iron and debris sheds. The "streets" are
dim corridors, with boardwalk floors, cluttered with
children and dogs. At night frail figures shuffle
around, suffering from Aids, tuberculosis or both.
Thailand was once praised for anti-HIV efforts in
disease hot zones such as this. But evidence suggests
that since the 1992 coup priorities have changed. In
1992, a health minister complained that talk about the
virus had "seriously affected tourism". And now,
official figures show that Aids prevention has been
slashed by one third against comparable public health
programmes.
The biggest cuts have been in initiatives aimed
specifically at drug misusers. "There used to be a
project for clean needles in the early 90s, but now
it's gone," a spokeswoman for a Khlong Toei charity,
the Duang Prateep Foundation, told me....
Nobody could explain the thinking, but the effect on
the junkies can be measured. Blood tests reveal that
HIV prevalence peaked among female prostitutes in 1993
- when 30% were positive - and has since fallen back
to 21%. Among rent boys, prevalence peaked in the
following year at 18%, and is now half that figure.
But prevalence among heroin-injectors has leapt from
31% in 1994 to a staggering 47% now.
Were these changes evidence that the government were
allowing the junkies to be put at greater risk to make
them useful for experiments? (Health department
officials told me that if AidsVax is marketed, they
expect a billion-dollar manufacturing plant.) I
couldn't find out. People wouldn't talk when I raised
such contentious concerns. Even Bangkok's Medicines
Sans Frontieres staff went silent when asked about the
trial.
Francis is convinced that nothing is amiss, and his
collaborators voice no worries. "All have assured me
that this has been done ethically," he told me, when
eventually we met. "We are going out of our way not to
increase the vulnerability of an already vulnerable
population." The trial was conducted in Thailand, he
said, for scientific reasons. Different parts of the
world are linked with different HIV subtypes, with
their myriad subsidiary strains. B subtype strains,
for instance, are most common in North America, Europe
and Australasia; A, C and D in Africa. In Thailand,
there's a mix of B and E strains and, for technical
reasons to do with E strains, the company argues that
success is more likely there "than anywhere else in
the world."
But there are aspects of the project which suggest
that the junkies may be involved in an unusual way. A
parallel trial among gay men at American clinics is
having problems finding and keeping volunteers, due to
scepticism towards the venture. But at Kachit's
clinics the programme has features which may help to
avoid these snags. The junkies get methadone, an oral
heroin substitute, plus $10 expenses for each of up to
17 visits. The risk is the appearance of offering
drugs and money as inducements to this desperate
group.
There's also a feature of the experiment's design that
seems self-contradictory. If the methadone liquid got
people off injecting heroin, the volunteers' risk of
infection would slump and they would be of little use
to the vaccine trial. In fact, documents drawn up with
the CDC and WHO show that that 7% of clinic users are
expected to become HIV-infected each year. So, despite
the oral methadone, they keep injecting heroin. They
may even buy it with VaxGen's money and have an
increased risk of getting Aids.
The logic of the trial creates a dilemma for Francis.
The moral uncertainties about using junkies as GUINEA
PIGS might be offset by humanity's greater needs. But
there would need to be plausible scientific grounds to
think that AidsVax might work. And on that the VaxGen
experiment is open to even greater doubts. ***** When
Francis returns from his trips to Bangkok, it's to
Brisbane, a community on the San Francisco peninsula,
midway between the city and its airport. His home and
workplace both looks eastward across the bay: towards
Oakland and, beyond that, America. His home is on a
hill and lined with Chinese paintings. His office is
by the shore, in black glass.
He huddles weekly with his senior colleagues: VaxGen's
vice-president, Dr Phillip Berman, and its chairman,
Dr Robert Nowinski. Berman, aged 49, is a molecular
biologist. He's heavy set with curly hair and has
laboured on the science for 15 years. Nowinski, 52, is
bald and wears glasses. He's a biotechnology
entrepreneur from Seattle. His main claim to fame is
having founded and sold a company, ICOS, which boasts
Microsoft's Bill Gates as an owner.
The key document at many of their sessions is a
"special issue" of a prestigious journal, called Aids
Research and Human Retroviruses. It's dated last
October. Twenty papers are inside and they're a rave
for VaxGen's ideas. Dr Seth Berkley, the International
Aids Vaccine Initiative's president, declares that
politics and economics are bigger obstacles to
progress than "a scientific barrier". Dr Mary Lou
Clements-Mann, a researcher for a rival company's
vaccine (and who died in a Swissair plane crash off
Nova Scotia last year), shrugs off pessimistic
"misperceptions". ...
When visitors drop by, Berman outlines his own paper.
It sets out how AidsVax is meant to work. "Many lines
of evidence suggest that a strong antibody response to
the HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein," he explains, "will
be an essential feature of any Aids vaccine." Berman
sketches what this means on a board in the conference
room, across the corridor from Francis's office. The
billions spent on Aids have produced unparalleled
insights on HIV, which are the platform on which he
builds. The virus infects. The immune system checks it
with, among other things, specially-tailored
antibodies. But the virus mutates around these
adversaries. So the immune system tailors new
defences. The virus then mutates and immunity
responds. It's like a leapfrog competition.
Eventually, the immune system tires of all this
leaping, packs up and then it's Aids.
Of all the different parts of HIV, the envelope
glycoprotein gp120 is the part that mutates the most.
This sits in blobs around the virus, like loose balls
of wool, on the tips of protruding spikes. Berman
zooms on the moment a blob meets a cell, which is 1m
times bigger than the virus. Part of the blob's
surface locks onto a receptor (like a data-port where
cells get information). The blob then unravels and
locks another of its parts onto a second sort of
receptor on the cell. This cues the cell to pull the
virus inside. Infection is complete.
Here, Berman argues, is where AidsVax helps: by
blocking this double-lock connection. Summoned in
advance, due to earlier vaccination, antibodies stick
to key parts of the blob and so stop it from locking
on the cell. If the virus is a burglar, these
antibodies are bullterriers, waiting for a leg to
appear through the window on which to snap their jaws.
Once they've got hold, the virus is paralysed, to be
disposed of by other kinds of cell.
He makes things sound simple. Visitors are impressed.
Investors wonder: why dither in Bangkok? But the
science expounded in the journal issue doesn't
convince many people who grasp the detail. "It's a
waste of time," Dr Robert Gallo, America's pre-eminent
retrovirologist, told me. Prof Andrew McMichael, Aids
vaccine chief at Oxford's Institute of Molecular
Medicine, said: "I wouldn't have the belief that this
will work." And Dr Jean-Paul Levy, head of France's
vaccine programme, spat: "It forgets one century of
science."
For all the plausibility of the journal's special
issue, the most detailed analysis of VaxGen's approach
was published in February last year in the Journal of
Virology, an even more influential publication. More
than 500 people - mostly American gay men - took part
in preliminary tests of gp120 in the mid-1990s but
experts at seven of America's leading research centres
found that, despite the shots, 16 vaccine recipients
became infected with HIV. That's more than 3% of those
getting vaccine, roughly the same percentage as those
on placebo.
Molecular biologists were not surprised, although
their critique is extremely technical. What it boils
down to is that if HIV leapfrogs the immune system -
with all its astounding complexity - it will easily do
the same with antibodies induced by an off-the-shelf
manufactured product. Inducing antibodies to one B
strain, or two E strains, or five, or fifty XYZ
strains, is like buying insurance against being hit by
cars with specified license plates.
VaxGen's answer is to develop products from strains it
claims provide "cross-protection" against others. In
Bangkok, for instance, the vaccine is AidsVax B/E,
including gp120 clones from one B and one E strain.
The B strain was isolated from a six-year-old New
Jersey boy in 1984, while the E strain was collected
from a soldier in Chiang Mai about nine years ago. The
plan is to mix 'n' match vaccines in this way to suit
the subtypes in different parts of the world. Berman
zooms closer and claims that parts of gp120 stay
sufficiently constant between the mutating strains to
offer a point of attack. Like all proteins, the blob
is made from amino acid molecules, which string
together like beads in a necklace to make the loose
balls of wool. Each bead is made from one of a
possible 20 amino acids. Letters are used to denote
these acids: G stands for glycine, for instance, R for
arginine and Q for glutamine.
Berman says that the vaccine needs to copy the amino
acid sequence at a key point in this string. Near to
where gp120 locks onto the cell, there is a loose loop
of "wool" - not 100 millionth a cell's size - which
biologists call V3. Berman zooms again: to the tip of
this loop, a string of just six necklace beads. Here,
he argues, is a segment that remains more constant
than most and induces antibodies which will stick and
stop the double-lock connection with the cell. All it
needs is for the vaccine and the virus to have the
same acids at the tip of this loop.
Using this argument, Berman deduces that the early
tests of gp120 offer hope for the experiment after
all. Mostly, volunteers studied for the Journal of
Virology were injected with gp120 cloned from the New
Jersey strain, in which the necklace in the V3 loop's
tip has the beads GPGRAF (meaning: glycine, proline,
glycine, arginine, alanine, and phenylalanine). It's a
common configuration in North American strains. But
Berman argues that some of the volunteers who became
HIV-positive despite being vaccinated were infected
with strains in which the loop was different: say,
GPGRVL (ending with valine and leucine instead). This,
he suggests, was why the gp120 didn't protect them.
With the commoner strains he believes it did.
At VaxGen's offices, this bottom-line is dazzling. The
"special issue" paper quickens pulses. But additional
information reveals an oddity, which Berman's
presentation overlooks. At the American government's
Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, staff
track amino acid sequences for thousands of HIV
strains. And when I asked them to print their data
from Thailand, a startling contradiction emerged. The
B component in AidsVax B/E - the shots being given to
the junkies - has the New Jersey V3 loop tip sequence.
It goes: GPGRAF.
According to Berman's argument, the local B strains
would need to have the same string of beads. But only
10% of Thai B strains have the New Jersey amino acid
sequence. Far more often - in nearly half the strains
- there are two different beads in the loop's tip:
glutamine (Q) and tryptophan (W). They are GPGQAW. By
Berman's own reasoning, the Bangkok junkies are being
injected with the wrong vaccine. ***** Every six
months, a ten-strong committee of doctors and
scientists crowds into VaxGen's boardroom. This is the
"data safety and monitoring board", recruited to keep
an eye on the experiment. On one side of the table
sits a Harvard infectious disease specialist. On the
other is a Yale ethicist. There are three Thai
physicians and a Seattle statistician. Dr Walter
Dowdle, a former CDC deputy director, presides. The
Americans are casual, in open-necked shirts, but
Dowdle runs proceedings with care. Piled around the
table are printouts on the volunteers, with blood
tests and other results. Using codes which nobody else
gets to look at, they can see who's getting AidsVax
and who the placebo and whether any difference the
number of HIV infections has emerged between the
groups.
By the convention for vaccines, any difference would
be vast for the product to be declared effective.
Measles vaccine, for instance, is 95% effective,
tetanus 90%, and hepatitis B 85%. But the committee's
brief is to watch for just 30% effectiveness. Such is
the threat from Aids, it's argued, that this figure is
enough for success.
I asked a professor of medical statistics to
number-crunch this percentage. To reach the 30% mark,
he said, there would only need to be 28 more
infections among junkies on the placebo than among
those receiving AidsVax. If VaxGen recruits 2,500 -
and on its assumption that in a year about 7% (87
people) on placebo will become infected due to
needle-sharing - then if the number who become
infected after getting AidsVax is 59 (4.7%) or fewer,
the committee can rule that the product works.
VaxGen critics think that even this meagre difference
couldn't appear, and that Dowdle, 68, will one day
emerge to drape a consoling arm on Francis's shoulder.
But an alternative scenario is predicted by some with
long research experience. Nobody can recall an HIV
product being ditched after reaching a full-scale
efficacy trial. And, such is the desire for "something
to be done" about Aids that science could be pushed to
one side.
The most powerful pressure for something to be done
comes from the White House, anxious to appease the
Aids lobby. In May 1997, President Clinton threw his
weight behind urgent action. "If the 21st century is
to be the century of biology," he declared. "Let us
make an Aids vaccine its first great triumph."
How such pressures can translate date back to 1989 and
the first anti-Aids drug, AZT. A board like Dowdle's
monitoring a trial among HIV-positive volunteers with
no obvious illness, saw data suggesting that
full-blown Aids could be prevented. At the time, AZT
was licensed only for terminal disease, but this
finding caused the trial to be halted and the product
to be approved for this use. But the decision was
based on a transitory data "blip", which had caused
the board to act prematurely. A longer study,
published four years later, found no preventative
effect.
Stopping trials in this way before their scheduled
completion is now standard in Aids product
development. "If efficacy is observed at the time of a
scheduled interim efficacy analysis," Nowinski
explains, "the monitoring board will recommend
termination of the trial."
But could bodies such as the Food and Drug
Administration and the European Medicines Evaluation
Agency license a vaccine that doesn't work on the
basis of an AZT-style blip? Evidence suggests that
agencies under political pressure take just such
paradoxical steps. The National Institutes of Health,
for instance, vetoed the VaxGen experiment as a waste
of money and volunteers. But after being accused of "a
human rights violation" by Dr Jonathan Mann, 51,
former WHO Aids chief (and who died with his wife,
Clements-Mann, also 51, in the Swissair crash), the
institutes not only reversed themselves, but granted
Francis $4.6m.
Sometimes the clamour may be marshalled by persons who
may not be as detached as they seem. The Journal of
Aids Research and Human Retroviruses, for instance,
has an editorial board that's a Who's Who of Aids. But
Francis paid the publisher $10,000 for the "special
issue", which Berman edited as a "guest". As for some
of the contributors, Francis helped to set up
Berkley's international vaccine initiative and advised
Bill Gates's charity foundation to give it $25m. He
has done a deal to supply proteins to the rival
manufacturer which employed Clements-Mann. And he has
offered the CDC's Heyward the post of VaxGen
vice-president, starting next January.
Pressure also comes from powerful bodies which have
long-held institutional agendas. The CDC, which mostly
collates disease data, first became a significant
health service body due to polio vaccine, launched in
April 1955. The WHO's singular success was smallpox
eradication, accomplished in October 1977. Mass
immunisation is what they know best. It's simply what
they do. "Don Francis reminds them of when they were
young," Dr John Moore, of New York's Aaron Diamond
Aids Research Center, told me.
What worries critics such as Moore is that political
and institutional pressures may lead to millions of
people being injected with AidsVax before the benefits
and risks are clear. The WHO estimates that annual
demand for the first vaccine will be 650m doses and
UNICEF leaders are thinking about adding it to
programmes for 100m children.
Francis anticipates that the CDC, which has already
granted him $8m, is to finance a US immunisation
campaign and, in Europe, national health services will
pick up the tab. "In addition, the International Aids
Vaccine Initiative has started a campaign to fund the
development and purchase of an HIV vaccine for the
developing world," VaxGen documents say. "In meetings
with us, the World Bank has indicated that it's
exploring the potential for low-interest loans to
support the purchase."
One of the snags which may be overlooked in this rush
is the effect on recipients' behaviour. Common sense
says that somebody who thinks that they may be
protected is more likely to take chances with risky
activities than a person who knows that they aren't.
One study of this effect in 1997 found that unsafe
sexual behaviours doubled among gay men in preliminary
vaccine tests. If this was repeated globally, the
impact of an even vaguely effective AidsVax may be
that the Aids epidemic gets worse. ***** South of
VaxGen's offices, the next freeway exit gives access
to its powerhouse: Genentech. This is the world's
front-runner in medical biotechnology, with seven
licensed products, from human growth hormones to a
clot-buster, Activase. Twenty years ago the company
was all dreams and venture capital; its few staff
snipping and splicing genes in a wasteland where
shipyards had died. Today, their ranks of Mercs and
BMWs surround 26 buildings in biology's Silicon
Valley.
Stopping by from time to time are visitors from its
master, the druggernaut Hoffman-La Roche. With twin
headquarters in Basle and New Jersey, and sales last
year of SWf24.7bn, this vitamins-to-Valium giant has
the marketing muscle should AidsVax come on stream. At
its own labs, Roche shuns the vaccine race, but with
taxes pledged to line-and-jab Africa and Asia
executives doodle in billions on the hope that Francis
pulls it off.
When I flew to San Francisco to quiz Francis for this
story, Berman was ecstatic, in jeans and a check
shirt, over a new $1.4m vaccine facility. The
experiment produces a torrent of clinic samples; each
volunteer gives blood on 17 visits, and each sample is
split for tests. Giant freezers were being installed
to store bar-coded specimens. There could be 400,000
in all. There's also a $500,000 microbiology kit going
in: DNA sequencers, PCR machines, centrifuges and the
like. Soon he would direct 30 staff in 20 rooms. He
was like a seven-year-old on Christmas Day.
The first thing that struck me was the push of the
spending, irrespective of scientific achievements.
Apart from all the investment so far, Genentech had a
10,000-litre fermenting tank, half full of New Jersey
strain vaccine. Nobody wanted that, worth $1m, flushed
away, much less the careers of its makers. The next
thing I noted was the standard of safety imposed on
the facility's construction. To handle a dangerous
pathogen in California, the brown-and-yellow building,
made from tipped-upright concrete slabs, was stamped
with certificates and permits by the box load before
the first plank was sawn. It's both earthquake- and
microbe-proof. And its forests of copper pipes, air
ducts and bio-filters were tested to tolerances few
structures could endure.
But while regulations make sure that the building is
safe, critics say that the product itself escapes much
rigorous scrutiny. With vaccines, any problems often
don't appear until mass-market use, and such is the
head of steam building up behind Francis that sceptics
think that if AidsVax doesn't join the annals of
useless shots, it has the potential to join, say, a
1960s measles vaccine that made the disease in those
infected worse.
What worries some scientists is that because AidsVax
provokes antibodies to its own specific gp120 strains,
there's a risk that it may actually suppress the
immune system's ability to combat other strains. On
this thinking (the principle is sometimes called
"deceptive imprinting") even if the junkies were
protected against the New Jersey and Chiang Mai
strains, they might die more quickly if they get
infected with one of the countless other mutations.
"There's nothing new in this," Dr Heinz Kohler, who
has led investigations at Kentucky University, said.
"It's just common sense."
At Kansas University, researchers have found that
monkeys injected with gp120 and then a hybrid kind of
HIV had more of the virus in their blood later on than
infected animals which weren't vaccinated. "The
question is: will those people who are vaccinated
progress to Aids more quickly if they become infected
with HIV than those who were not vaccinated at all?"
Prof McMichael at Oxford summarised. "We might not
know the answer for 10 years."
No such problems were revealed in the preliminary
tests, but despite the importance of long-term
follow-up (recipients of the hepatitis B vaccine that
Francis worked on in the early 1980s have been tracked
for two decades), VaxGen no longer monitors what has
happened to the people who received its product in the
mid-1990s preliminary tests. Francis argues that it
makes more sense to wait for the full-scale trial
results.
This apparent loss of data is surprising to some,
because history warns of the pitfalls of not being
thorough. In 1955, just one month after a
near-hysterical press conference in Michigan launched
polio vaccine, reports poured in to the CDC of
hundreds of children going down with the disease,
induced by the shots themselves. President Dwight
Eisenhower said that, because of the "great pressure
to bring this out", scientists may have "short-cut a
little bit".
AidsVax cannot give volunteers Aids, but there may be
something even more terrifying than the anxiety that
it might accelerate their disease if they are later
infected with HIV. Some scientists think that, if it
works at all, the product may have a dangerous effect
on the evolution of HIV. Five years ago, Los Alamos
scientists declared that there was "no simple answer"
as to whether Aids could become contagious through
coughs and sneezes - and other researchers argue that,
in much the same way as a partial course of
antibiotics can promote resistant bacteria, so a
poorly-effective vaccine may promote more deadly and
infectious strains.
This may sound like journalistic scare, but HIV's
best-understood RNA cousin is influenza virus, which
produces devastating mutations every 20 or 30 years.
Hepatitis B virus, meanwhile, has already produced
mutant strains accepted as being vaccine-induced.
"When you use a vaccine, you are introducing another
selective pressure," Dr Paul Ewald, professor of
biology at Amherst College, Massachusetts, explained.
"It could make the problem more damaging, or less
damaging, depending on the antigen you use."
Researchers told me that, compared with the potential
risks to volunteers, this doomsday scenario was
"unlikely". But with agencies standing by to jab
hundreds of millions of people, some wondered if, for
our species' safety, "unlikely" was reassuring enough.
"My personal view," Dr Art Ammann, president of the
San Francisco-based Global Strategy for HIV
Prevention, and a former AidsVax researcher, said, "is
that we could face a global nightmare." ...
[TO BE CONTINUED]
NOTES
1) Ingri Cassel, "Public Health Expert Says Solving
The Anthrax Mailing Mystery May Be Easy: FBI Doesn't
Seem Interested," news release, Tetrahedron, LLC, Nov.
12, 2001.
2) Paul Manning, Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile,
Secaucus: Lyle Stuart, 1981.
3) Adam Feuerstein, "VaxGen Hits Anthrax Jackpot,"
TheStreet.com, November 5, 2004.
http://www.thestreet.com/_googlen/comment/adamfeuerstein/10193015.html?cm_ve
n=GOOGLEN&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA
4) Brian Deer, "AidsVax: The VaxGen Experiment,"
Sunday Times Magazine (UK), October 3 1999.
5) Ibid.
6) Dr. Leonard Horowitz, "New Genocidal AIDS Vaccine
Experiments: Don Francis, Genentech, Hoffman-La-Roche,
and The Rise of the Fourth Reich," updated 11/07/02.
http://www.originofaids.com/articles/experiments.htm
7) Ibid. Also see, A. Cantwell, AIDS and the Doctors
of Death. 1988 (pp. 50-2, 78, 178), A. Cantwell, Queer
Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot. 1993 (pp. 42,
109, 123).
© 2005 Alex Constantine. All rights reserved.