Letter to Dr Sanjay Gupta on Ending AIDS

Dear Dr. Gupta:

This is a very belated letter, responding to the TV special on "Ending AIDS in our Lifetime" that you hosted a year ago. Eros Rising was on hold all of last year, while I worked on a book, so excuse me for the delay.

I remember tuning in to that special with bated breath. Because the show promised an end to AIDS in our lifetime, I assumed there had been some breakthrough on the development of an AIDS vaccine. How disappointed I was, therefore, to see that what you were hosting was a piece of fluff designed to make people feel good about their commitments to fighting AIDS. Listening carefully, I heard only one fleeting mention of the word "vaccine." There were CEOs from some major pharmaceutical corporations there, and they spoke glowingly of new treatments and initiatives to make current treatments available to poor nations at reduced prices. Then there were lots of personal testimonials from citizens who had obviously been flown in to add to this festival of hope that you were sponsoring. So what is my gripe? You offered not a scintilla of hope for ending AIDS in our lifetimes. You offered not even a hint of information as to why, two decades after this plague began, the world still does not have an AIDS vaccine. As a doctor, you must know that the only way to "end" AIDS is with a vaccine.

I invite the readers of this blog to first read your Big Pharma promotional piece (with the link above) and then a paper put together by Michael Kremer and Christopher M. Snyder, two researchers at Harvard, entitled "Why is There No AIDS Vaccine?" Young people may be forgiven for assuming that AIDS is a permanent curse on the human race. As a young journalist back in 1986, I remember reporting on the work being done at NIH to develop a vaccine, and learning that many researchers--including Dr Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the HIV virus--were optimistic that a vaccine would be developed within a reasonable time frame--perhaps within five years. Today the American media, which is largely financed by Big Pharma adverstising, doesn't even talk about the development of a vaccine. Instead they simply buy into statements such as: “the enormous genetic diversity and other unique features of the HIV envelope protein have thus far thwarted attempts to identify an effective candidate.”

The above statement comes from a recent abstract in the New England Journal of Medicine. Journalists are lax in challenging such statements, and demanding specifics. There are many intelligent people out here who could understand those specifics, if the media did their job and reported on them. All viruses mutate. What is so special about the AIDS virus that it should defy 21 years of efforts to develop a vaccine for it? Please, big Media, don't give it to us in a soundbytes: spell it out, challenge by challenge, and stumbling block by stumbling block.

I would humbly suggest that what is thwarting the development of a vaccine is exactly what Kremer and Snyder conclude in their important (but ignored) paper: It is not in the financial interest of Big Pharma to end AIDS. AIDS has turned out to be one of the industry's fatted calves. They decided long ago that it was far more profitable to treat AIDS than to end it. Six years ago, AIDS drugs were a $300 billion business. Today it would be reasonable to guess that that has mushroomed into a $1 trillion dollar business. That, Dr. Gupta, is what you should be reporting on. Shame on you for buying in so completely to Big Pharma's propogranda. Shame on you for exploiting the hope and despair of hundreds of thousands, now millions, of AIDS victims to advance the cause of the corporate virus that keeps AIDS alive. The virus has a name: it is called Greed.