By Marie Rosenthal, MS
I’m a little tired of COVID-19, and I’m sure you are, too, so we decided to end 2021 talking about a different pandemic. 2021 commemorated the publication of the first case report of what would become AIDS 40 years ago, and our coverage begins on page 6 of our print edition.
I was fortunate to be able to interview some of the pioneers who were there since the beginning—and are still treating people with HIV or researching this disease—as well as the people who began their practices a little later and are contributing to this field.
I have to give a special thank you to Dr. Anthony Fauci for taking time away from fighting COVID-19 to talk with me for this story. To be honest, I think he agreed because I promised not to talk about COVID-19, although we did end up talking about it. How could you not in 2021?
However, it was in the context of fighting both pandemics.
The last time I talked with Dr. Fauci was when he announced the plan to end HIV in the United States at the CROI meeting in 2019, and during our conversation for this 40th commemoration story, we talked about the effects that COVID-19 had on that effort. COVID-19 has certainly put that lofty goal behind schedule, but it has not derailed it, he assured me.
And money and resources have been diverted from HIV to COVID-19, others told me, which is understandable. Although HIV has killed more people overall—about 36 million—it has done so over 40 years. COVID-19 has killed more than 5.3 million people in under two years.
Both are staggering statistics to think about, and the efforts to fight both pandemics have been Herculean.
The time line for the two pandemics is noteworthy for something else—the lack of technology during the early days of the HIV pandemic. There was no internet when HIV was discovered, so physicians and researchers had to rely on peer-reviewed print publications, presentations at scientific meetings and landline telephones to disseminate information quickly. Even faxes were far from ubiquitous. Dr. Paul Volberding told me that writing a letter to the editor of a journal was a “quick” way to get the word out in the early days, and of course, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report was crucial to stay updated.
An important thing to remember is that research done in the field of HIV has helped develop COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. For instance, the adenovirus-based COVID-19 vaccine was first tested for HIV. When people say the vaccine was developed too quickly, it was actually years in the making. And that research will come back around; researchers are already looking at mRNA technology to see whether it could be used to make an HIV vaccine.
Two unfortunate issues were prevalent in the early days of HIV, and are also a problem with COVID-19. One is equity, Drs. Rajesh Gandhi and Jonathan Li reminded me. That is a lesson that HIV can teach COVID-19. Access to treatment and vaccines is crucial everywhere.
You cannot fight a pandemic in just one country. You can’t cure it here and expect it to stay over there because, as we are reminded all the time, organisms do not observe country or state borders.
The second is the noise, and separating the signal from that noise is crucial. Although the internet is a wonderful tool for quickly disseminating data, it can spread misinformation even more quickly. I don’t envy any physician today trying to separate the signal from the noise.
So, my wish for 2022 is that you all succeed in this and end both pandemics, before many more die.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher.
