Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2003. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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San Francisco Examiner - May 7, 2003
Alison Soltau, Of The Examiner Staff
The Department of Public Health and a coalition of AIDS groups made their first tentative foray into the community last week to explain the world of clinical trials and medical research and to carefully test the waters for potential vaccine volunteers.
Back in February, the Bay Area pharmaceutical company VaxGen produced a report on its expensive, high-profile trial of a potential vaccine.
The study tested a vaccine's effectiveness in blocking the virus in humans and concluded that the vaccine did not protect the vast majority of its participants but might show some early signs of protecting blacks and Asians.
But the study was fraught with problems and remains clouded with confusion for many who have seen or heard about it.
The Department of Public Health on Thursday said that the study chiefly involved gay white men, who accounted for more than 80 percent of its sample.
Because so few blacks, women, and Asians were tested, health officials said, any apparently positive findings for those groups could not be deemed a significant pattern.
Audience members and DPH representatives stressed the need for pharmaceutical companies to include more African Americans in their trials.
Black women make up 8 percent of the overall female population of The City but 44 percent of women infected with HIV.
Daniel Hlad, of the Black Coalition on AIDS, said it was a common perception in the gay community that the VaxGen study had actually been unfairly discounted because its findings didn't show any benefits to white men.
Hlad said that many felt that the possible benefits hinted at in the study for blacks were largely overlooked by the media and the scientific community.
"It's difficult to access the black community. It would be less of a problem if there were more black researchers," he said.
"We would encourage people to come forward for studies. We would also ask the scientific establishment to involve us and use us more to reach out to the community in a way that isn't threatening to them."
Redge Norton, of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, said that historically there was distrust between blacks and the scientific community, as African Americans in the past felt they were being used as guinea pigs in scientific experiments.
Norton said it was important for the community to be recruited onto scientific-community advisory boards in the early stages, when the terms of the trials were being drawn up, and not brought in at the last minute.
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