The Virtual Vaccine

Contact: media@aidsaction.org or call: 202- 986-1300

In 1996, we got hope. In 1997, we got complacent. In 1998, we get reality.

Two years ago, death-worn communities ravaged by AIDS finally got what we desperately waited fifteen years for -- a medical breakthrough. Since then, new AIDS drugs have prolonged the lives of thousands and gave us hope that an HIV diagnosis was no longer a sentence to certain death.

But the new AIDS drugs that gave the gift of prolonged life also gave way to a misperception of "cure," "end" and "over." As a result, risky behavior increased and, consequently, so did HIV infection rates. Equally disturbing, during the same two-year period that infection rates have increased, federal prevention funding has remained flat.

At the same time President Clinton advocates an intensive effort to find a medical vaccine, national support for HIV prevention is stagnant. The reality is that the current generation of AIDS drugs don't work for everyone and are a cure for no one.

Until there is a genuine end of AIDS, we have to treat prevention like the vaccine we so desperately crave. AIDS drugs cost $40 a day. Condoms cost 40 cents and are proven to prevent the spread of HIV.

If there were a medical vaccine for AIDS, imagine the forces mobilized to deploy it. The irony is that today we have a virtual vaccine -- prevention and education -- and those forces are paralyzed. To ensure that the deadliest disease of the 20th century doesn't carry the same distinction for the 21st, we must reinvigorate our national commitment to stopping HIV infection in the first place.

A new era of prevention means new approaches for a new generation of young people at risk. This group constitutes half of all new HIV infections, yet according to a recent study, only 10% of young people even think they are at risk. For many young people who were too young to witness the devastation AIDS wrought in the first fifteen years of the epidemic, condoms and safe sex are simply a "retro-eighties thing" book-ended between C. Everett Koop and Nancy Reagan's wagging finger. And for African-Americans, who make who make up 55% of all AIDS cases today, up from about 30% in 1982, national leadership for prevention efforts is scattered and uncoordinated.

The success of a new era of prevention depends upon shared responsibility, not finger pointing or blame, but commitment from all sectors of society -- public and private, individuals and communities -- to fight the spread of HIV.

Our nation's leaders have a responsibility to fund and support community-based and national prevention efforts so that those at risk have the tools they need to avoid HIV infection. Local communities have a responsibility to provide those at risk with the unvarnished truth about how HIV is spread. And "just say no" just doesn't work -- people need to know what they can do, not only what they can't.

And, yes, individual responsibility means that those who are HIV-positive or at risk for HIV have a responsibility to protect their own health and the health of others.

Today, AIDS Action is launching a ten-point plan to reinvigorate our national commitment to HIV prevention. Many of these proposals are new and many of them build upon the important work of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To begin, prevention education funding at the CDC should be increased by 25 percent. Ending flat prevention education funding is not only morally right, it's fiscally sound. Indeed, if only 4,000 new infections were prevented annually, the money invested in prevention would be saved in future health care costs.

With half of all HIV infections attributed directly of indirectly to substance abuse, treatment on request should be the first step in a genuine battle against the twin epidemics of substance abuse and AIDS.

At the beginning of the epidemic, AIDS Action was opposed to HIV testing. Today, we want it safe, swift and simple. Anonymous testing must be available in every corner of the nation and, with 700,000 people every year failing to return for their test results, rapid testing with same day results should become the testing standard.

And let's put the AIDS hotline on-line. A heavily publicized prevention Web site featuring anonymous E-mail, with prevention counselors and a national testing referral database, would reach young people where they're listening. In fact, a May study funded by the National Institutes of Health found that young people are as much as 14 times more likely to discuss high-risk behavior in the anonymity of cyberspace.

Networks that sensationalize sex on TV have a responsibility to portray the reality of sex, not just the fantasy. Let's put the v-chip to use in fighting AIDS, not just violence. Networks should allow condom ads on programs rated "S" for sexual content under the new rating system.

And it's been a decade since Surgeon General Koop's AIDS mailing to all American households. We need a similarly ambitious effort to reach African-American and Latino communities that are now at the epicenter of the epidemic.

Finally, our virtual vaccine is just that, virtual. A one-time vaccine is the only sure way to end this epidemic. But even that effort is stalled. The President last year called for a intense national effort to find an AIDS vaccine. A year into the project, he hasn't even named a director.

If enacted, our Virtual Vaccine plan would reinvigorate prevention, save lives and save money. But if we maintain the status quo of stagnancy and neglect, a new generation of young Americans will experience the ravages that AIDS brought the last one.