AIDS Fatigue: Celia Farber on "the AIDS Spin Machine"

From New York Press, a lengthy and thorough argument, right or wrong, from Celia Farber, with particular attention to Uganda and to Jonathan Fishbein:

After 20 years of hysteria, alarmism, misplaced recrimination and guilt, AIDS fatigue has beaten the newspaper-reading mind into a kind of blank. Citizens can't be faulted for not knowing how exactly to respond to last week's eruption of scandal from an NIH whistle-blower named Jonathan Fishbein, an AIDS researcher charged with overseeing clinical trials here and abroad. A reverberating language of bureaucracy and euphemism surrounds AIDS stories, making it impossible to know what has actually transpired. When people die from AIDS drugs, for instance, the word "death" is studiously avoided. I have seen medical articles documenting the fact that more people now die of toxicities from AIDS drugs than from the vanishingly opaque syndrome we once called AIDS. Death was referred to as a "grade four event," thus placing it eerily within the acceptable parameters of predictable phenomena in AIDS research—not as a failure, a crisis or even something to lament.

NIH's Jonathan Fishbein Takes Whistleblower Protection

MSNBC:

Dr. Jonathan Fishbein, a 10-year expert on safe drug research practices in the private sector before joining NIH in summer 2003, has met with congressional investigators and provided extensive information about problems in NIH research.

NIH officials declined to discuss Fishbein, citing personnel privacy, except to say the move to fire him is based on his performance. Fishbein, who is represented by the National Whistleblower Center, was told earlier this year he is being fired before he completes his two-year employment probation after a series of disputes with NIH managers over safety concerns in various AIDS research projects, according to his lawyer.

An AIDS Vaccine that Works??

Nature Medicine reports that a French research trial fuels hope for prevention and mollification of the effects of HIV infection. Even as preliminary data, this is promises to be the biggest news in the history of HIV & AIDS research and will be cause for much discussion about next steps. The sample size is very very small and it is very important that the results not be blown out of proportion, which no doubt they will - although at the time of this posting lots of American papers are clueless about this finding. But let's just say that the research pans out ... what happens then? Let your mind wander back to the early science and policy wars over the way in which AIDS research is prioritized, and then consider a political world in which gay marriage might have been the defining issue in an election that brought to power a president who "owes" fundamentalist protestants and despises the UN...