The Nation - News from Feb. 19, 1988

Final testing of any AIDS vaccine might have to be done in Africa rather than the United States, because the U.S. AIDS infection rate is not high enough to determine whether a vaccine is working, a government researcher said. Even among homosexual men, the rate of new infections is no longer high enough to provide sufficient data on a vaccine’s effectiveness, said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in testimony before the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic. Fauci told the commi1936943471vaccines are in Phase 1 trials, meant only to see whether they are safe and whether they spur an immune response. Phase 2 aims to find the proper safe dose that gives maximum immune response.