“Putting Third First, Vaccines, Access to Treatment and the Law” drew a hundred AIDS treatment access and vaccine advocates to Barcelona on Friday 6 July, just before the 2002 International Conference on AIDS. The main outcome was a proposal that treatment, microbicide and vaccine advocates should explore the common principles behind their efforts as well as to explore what they can learn from each other.
This was graphically expressed by Mark Heywood, of the South African AIDS Law Project (who is also National Secretary of the Treatment Action Campaign) when he called for a "marriage" of the respective movements.
The meeting had several themes: obstacles to treatment access and to vaccine development and opportunities to overcome them; the role of law, and especially human rights law, in advancing these issues; and how treatment access and vaccine advocates could learn from each other and work together.
Keynote speaker Justice Edwin Cameron, of South Africa, spoke powerfully of AIDS as a “defining issue”. He noted some encouraging developments in the last two years, but said there was still not an appropriate level of response. This inadequacy included governments in Africa, whose New Economic Plan for African Development (NEPAD) treated AIDS as if it were a marginal issue. It also clearly included the wealthy countries of the G8 (and OECD) which fail to meet longstanding commitments on international development aid and had been "scandalously inadequate" in their response to NEPAD.
In particular, the last two years have seen the UN Declaration of Commitment, the launch of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, and the Doha declaration of the World Trade Organisation (that protecting public health is ultimately more important than protecting intellectual property rights); there had also been a reduction in antiretroviral drug prices by 90%.
However, the biggest change he detected was a change in thinking, about the feasibility of providing treatment and taking vaccines through to full-scale trials in developing countries.
This change of thinking was evident throughout the meeting. As one vaccine advocate put it, "I will never again argue for vaccines on the basis that treatments are too expensive".
Similarly, there is an emerging recognition that the failure to devote adequate resources to vaccine and microbicide development is as much a violation of human rights as the failure to provide treatment to those who are already ill or at high risk of becoming ill.
- The Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network has recommended that Canada develop a national HIV vaccine strategy and Paul Gully, of Health Canada, announced at the meeting that the Canadian government is now planning to take up this recommendation in addition to providing Can$50million (about US$33million) for IAVI and the African AIDS Vaccine Programme.
The meeting was organised by the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, the AIDS Law Project of South Africa, and the Lawyers’ Collective HIV/AIDS Unit, India. Unfortunately, the Lawyers’ Collective’s Vivek Divan, a speaker and author of one of the background papers, could not attend having been denied a visa to attend the conference by the Spanish authorities. The background papers are to be revised following the meeting and the meeting will also be the subject of a special issue of the journal published by the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network.