The AIDS virus is found, the vaccine never comes
In 1984, the US government promised an AIDS vaccine within two years. People are still waiting.
On 23 April 1984, Margaret Heckler faced the press in Washington. The US Secretary of Health had news that many had been waiting for for three years: the probable cause of AIDS had been found. It was a virus that the researcher Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute had isolated and named HTLV-III.
The situation was dramatic. More than four thousand AIDS cases had been reported in the United States, and more than seventeen hundred people had died. Most of them were gay men. Ronald Reagan's administration had been criticised for years for playing down the epidemic. Now it wanted to show results.
And Heckler delivered. A new blood test would detect infected people and contaminated blood supplies with practically one hundred per cent certainty. Then came the sentence that went down in history: a vaccine was to be ready for testing in about two years.
Even then there were doubts. A science journalist noted in MIT Technology Review that only the wildest optimists still expected a vaccine this decade. In the end, even she was too optimistic.
The fame of the discovery also stood on shaky ground. A team led by Luc Montagnier at the Institut Pasteur in Paris had already described a virus called LAV a year earlier. It was the same one. Only after a bitter dispute did the French and the Americans share the honour and the income from the patent for the blood test. Since 1986, the pathogen has been called HIV.
The test did come and made blood transfusions safer. The vaccine remained a promise. For a whole generation of gay men, real help only came in the mid-nineties with the first effective combination therapies. For countless people it was already too late. There is still no vaccine against HIV today.