The gay community has known all along that major drug companies have no incentive to rush to develop a vaccine for AIDS when it is so lucrative for them to continue selling "life maintaining" drug therapies for AIDS patients. Now the NIH comes out and states the obvious. They will wait for the government to spend the money and do the research to develop the vaccine and run with it when they it starts taking a bite out of their drug-therapy profits. This is despicable corporate behavior, truly worthy of a GOP leaning industry.
Maybe it is time for "ACT UP" to start storming corporate offices of these companies.
more below the fold-
AIDS expert: Drug companies avoid HIV vaccine research
Edmund Tramont, the federal government's chief of AIDS research, testified in a recent trial that he believes pharmaceutical companies aren't seriously focusing on HIV vaccine research because there is no financial incentive to do so and that the government is being forced to pick up the slack. "It's not going to be made by a company. They're dropping out like flies because there's no real incentive for them to do it. We have to do it," Tramont, head of the AIDS research division at the National Institutes of Health, testified regarding HIV vaccine development in a deposition in a recent employment lawsuit obtained by the Associated Press.
Tramont, in a follow-up e-mail to the Associated Press, wrote that the pharmaceutical industry tends to be less committed to any vaccine research and development because it is not a profit center for the companies. "It is not just an HIV vaccine--it's all vaccines--that is why there was/is a shortage of flu vaccines," Tramont wrote to the news service.
(from The Advocate -
http://www.advocate.com/...)