At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci worked with activists to implement a policy shift that increased the number of patients who had access to experimental HIV/AIDS treatments — and saved countless lives.
, came along, it was almost uniformly fatal. But when Fauci started working on it, he was also called to consult for cancer chemotherapy patients at the National Cancer Institute, just on their treatment — because they get very powerful [toxic drugs], and it suppresses their immune system. So doctors like Fauci were experts on the immune system, and when he saw a bunch of that, a weird thing occurred to him, which is: The vasculitis patients have overactive immune systems.
On how activists initially blamed Fauci for the slow pace of HIV/AIDS drug trials when he became the head of NIAID in 1984 Basically, drug trials, for a long time, have undergone a particular system where you try a drug over a period of time in a small group of people who are healthy, to see if it's safe, if it has side effects, if it would harm you. Once that's done, and it can take a while, you then move to another level of testing called Phase II, where you test a small group of people to see if it's effective.
In 1989, Fauci and then-U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan announced results of studies showing that the antiviral drug AZT had delayed the onset of disease in some people with HIV.In 1989, Fauci and then-U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan announced results of studies showing that the antiviral drug AZT had delayed the onset of disease in some people with HIV.
Fauci, once he understood that the activists weren't saying,"Let's get rid of the whole system,' but, [rather], 'Let's open it up a bit so that we can have some relief while we press on to get the ultimate answer.'"He said,"Jesus, that makes perfect sense." And he proposed something called"parallel track," which was these sort of two systems — the old system and the new melded in. And that's what was adopted, and it worked.
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