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President Bill Clinton has failed to do enough to accelerate AIDS vaccine development, a year after pledging to develop an AIDS vaccine within a decade, according to US vaccine research advocates.

A critical report issued last week by the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC), a pressure group based in San Francisco, complains that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has failed to appoint a director for the new vaccine research centre that Clinton set up to lead the effort (see Nature 387, 323; 1997). It also says that the president has done nothing in the interim to follow through on his pledge. “A few inspiring speeches do not constitute leadership,” the group says.

Some of AVAC's criticisms are echoed by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, an operation supported by the World Bank and the United Nations AIDS programme. “We believe the president can do more,” says Seth Berkley, president of the initiative, who says the ten-year goal will be met only if current efforts are accelerated.

AVAC says that NIH has faced a struggle in hiring a director for its new vaccine research centre because the individual appointed would have no autonomous budget, and would lack a well-defined place in the NIH management hierarchy.

Anne Thomas, a spokeswoman for NIH, says that the appointment is subject to “considerations that are as important as speed”, adding that “the search is active and we hope to have someone on campus this year”. Of the general criticism, she says: “We think the work is progressing well in the vaccine programme, both intramural and extramural.”

AVAC also says that corporations are not doing enough vaccine research. It singles out the pharmaceutical company Smith-Kline Beecham which, it says, has $1.2 billion in annual vaccine revenues but “essentially no active HIV-vaccine development programme”.

But the group does applaud the speed with which the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases issued 58 new “innovation grants” for vaccine research last year, and says the share of AIDS research funding spent on vaccines at NIH has grown from 6.7 per cent in 1995 to 9.5 per cent this year.

The comments of the two groups reflect long-standing concerns on the part of some physicians and AIDS activists that an unbridgeable gap still divides basic research from the trial and development of an AIDS vaccine. Many researchers, however, consider this gap less of a problem than the dearth of promising vaccine candidates for trial.

Scott Hitt, a Los Angeles physician who chairs the President's Advisory Committee on HIV/AIDS, says: “The president has stated a very ambitious goal. Until the vaccine is out, there will always be criticism that we're not doing enough.”