Legacy Project
Have you heard comments like these?
"AIDS was created to kill off Black and Hispanic people."
"There is already a vaccine that could prevent the spread of HIV, but because it only works on Blacks and Hispanics, no one wants to invest in it."
"HIV is only a problem in Africa-not Philadelphia."
Inaccurate information, unbalanced media coverage of HIV-related news, the infamous Tuskegee experiments, and issues surrounding sexuality and government mistrust have enabled harmful myths to take root in the African American and Latino communities.
The Legacy Project was started to address some of these issues. It is a venture of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), located at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA, whose purpose is to conduct studies and administer HIV vaccine research throughout the world. The Legacy Project's goal is to increase the participation of people of color in HIV vaccine trials in order to make sure the vaccine works for the populations most affected by the virus.
Overcoming these issues of trust is perhaps the largest barrier to recruiting ethnic minority participants for vaccine trials-and one that is crucial to Steven Wakefield, the Legacy Project's Director. HIV vaccine research sites are actively engaged in building the partnerships that will address historic distrust of research.
This means that he regularly confronts stigma, myths, and misperceptions surrounding HIV/AIDS in the African-American community. Wakefield addresses these challenges through community education and says the project's intent is to "turn the Tuskegee legacy on its head" and create a new legacy of trust between vaccine researchers and the cities in which they are located.
Wakefield's career began in Chicago, where he taught high school before leading two nonprofit organizations focused on AIDS treatment, prevention, and adult education. "I was in a research study myself and you went in every six months for an interview and they asked you to keep track of the people that you know living with HIV/AIDS and when I reached 500, I told them I could no longer answer that question."
Then, as now, Wakefield was driven by the enormity of lives lost and the rising rates of HIV infection. "I know that in a 24-hour period, 14,000 new HIV infections happen around the world. That's about 580 people an hour. I know that human beings want to change their behavior and often they can't. The only hope of ending this epidemic from my perspective is a biomedical intervention," Wakefield said.
Find out more about the Legacy Project.
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