BANGKOK, 13 July 2004 — The crisis over funding the global fight against AIDS emerged as a key issue at the world AIDS forum yesterday, as activists demanded billions more dollars for prevention and treatment and held wealthy nations accountable for the pandemic.
Experts said the bill for treatment and prevention of the worst health crisis of modern times would be “extremely expensive” and governments, civil society and the private sector needed to put up much more than had been offered.
“The world stands now at a point of the launch of massive scale-up” of prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS, but “it will be extremely expensive”, said Richard Feachem, the director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Jean-Francois Richard, the World Bank vice president for Europe, said the international community was “very slow and inefficient” in solving problems such as the AIDS crisis.
He said the cost could run beyond the $20 billion a year estimated by the United Nations AIDS agency to be needed by 2007.
“We are far away from that number, and we’re far away from rebuilding the health systems in the world,” he said.
Countries currently spend $900 billion a year on the military and $350 billion on farm subsidies, he said.
“The world has a lot of spending that could be diverted to the global issues, one of which happens to be AIDS. The money is there, what we don’t have is the will by nation states.”
Several dozen protestors meanwhile stormed the conference and threw mock blood over posters of world leaders including US President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in protest over a shortfall in funding to tackle the epidemic. They said the Group of Seven wealthiest nations, which also includes France, Italy, Germany and Canada, had failed to live up to their commitments to provide $10 billion a year to the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS.
“Each of the countries is in breach of their 2001 promise,” Khalil Elouardighi of Act-UP Paris told reporters after the demonstration.
The G-7 “collectively share responsibility for the needless deaths of countless thousands because of their inaction,” the activists said in a statement, and in a mock trial they found the leaders “guilty of mass murder.”
An AIDS vaccine is still years away even under the most optimistic scenario and scientists may have to go back to the drawing-board if the current batch of candidates, all focused on one approach, fails.
Seth Berkley, president and chief executive of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), said the number of potential vaccines in clinical trials had doubled since 2000, but the research effort remained inadequate.
“The world is inching toward a vaccine, when we should be making strides,” he told reporters. “Only a vaccine can end the epidemic.”
IAVI’s biennial report on the state of research — which called for a doubling of AIDS vaccine funding to $1.3 billion a year — listed more than 30 candidates now in clinical trials in 19 countries.
But only one has reached final Phase III testing and many scientists are doubtful about the product, which combines Aventis’s Alvac with VaxGen’s Aidsvax, following the failure of separate Aidsvax trials last year.
Merck, meanwhile, is expected to start a Phase IIb “proof of concept” trial on its vaccine before the end of the year.
In both cases, IAVI clinical research head Wayne Koff said researchers would not find out whether the vaccines worked until late 2007 or 2008.
Merck says its product is unlikely to be 100 percent effective. “We don’t expect to have a sterilizing immunity,” said company vaccine researcher Jon Condra.
