I spent Gay Pride this year at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center booth recruiting for people who might be interested in receiving an experimental HIV vaccine. The general criteria is that we are looking for people of all genders and sexual orientations who are between the ages of 18-50 and who are willing to receive a vaccine and who are willing to visit the medical center about once a month for a year. We are also looking for those rare individuals who either have HIV and are hardly affected by it (elite suppressors) or those who have been exposed to HIV without contracting it (elite resistors). Besides the vaccine, we are also testing microbicides (gels) that women can use, which hopefully would decrease the chances of their contracting HIV.
At most times, the researchers have several vaccines that they are testing and all of them would give useful information in developing a vaccine which, when administered, would prevent an HIV-negative person from ever contracting HIV. I have periodically done recruitment work for this project over the past two years. I consider this to be a safe clinical trial in which to participate, but when I talk to people the most common objections that I hear are that it would be dangerous to participate or that they are ineligible because they do not have HIV or AIDS. It is my personal opinion that the risks of receiving an HIV vaccine are acceptably low by my own and most other people’s safety standards, so I disagree that participation is dangerous. When people tell me that they are ineligible because they do not have HIV or AIDS it is just because of general ignorance about what a vaccine is; the fact is that vaccines are preventative and intended for healthy people who do not have a particular condition, so we are only looking for people who do not have HIV.
Recruitment is often intense. People come to us out of curiosity and because we call them over, and generally they only want to share a few sentences with us. They bring a lot of their preconceptions with them, and often when they leave we have done little more than determine that they do not fully understand what we are doing but hopefully impressed upon them the idea that we are doing some scientific research that requires volunteers in order to find a prevention tool against HIV. For us, we have to be in good spirits and eager to talk after getting mass continual rejection from a sequence of individuals. This is just the way advertising works; we post ads in newspapers, on buses, online, and we show up at events, and practically everyone we talk to has never heard of us. As I understand, when someone finally does call us up, they tell stories about how they saw us at a party and then forgot us, then saw our ad and forgot us again, then saw a few more ads and finally called. It is just the way advertising works.
I really enjoy recruiting volunteers for this research, both because I feel that it is good for society but also because I think there are immediate educational benefits for people who participate. It is fun to meet with people whether or not they are eligible to participate just because I like talking to people about the research, especially if they are actually interested. If anyone reading this post is between the ages of 18-50 and generally interested in receiving an experimental HIV-related preventative treatment, then please call 206.667.2300 for more information.