HIV / AIDS Vaccine Research Funding Announcement
Baltimore, MD
May 5, 2011
As Delivered
Thank you very very much. Brit Kirwan, what a tremendous leader of this great university system. It’s great to see you all. This is a wonderful building , this is like being at the Meyerhof or something! This is wonderful with all this natural light. Did you all have to pay more to get that seat at the top? No?
Look, this is a great day, isn’t it? The Good Lord even brought out the beautiful sunshine of this spring as if to punctuate this day as a day of importance and a day that I think many of us will remember for a long time.
I want to thank Brit Kirwan for his leadership, Treasurer Nancy Kopp, who does such a tremendous job as our treasurer—Maryland is one of only eight states to still have a AAA Bond Rating, for those of you who follow along and read those things. I also want to thank Dean Reece for his leadership, Dr. Perman, a tremendous force of innovation, Dr. Britz, who is here from our Maryland Biotech Center, and Stewart Greenebaum, whose name is synonymous with healing and the great work here at the University of Maryland Medical System. And I also wanted to thank especially former Lt. Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend for all of her work with this great institute. Kathleen, thank you.
As mayor I knew of Dr. Gallo’s work but I didn’t know about it as well as I would come to know about it. And one of the people that really insisted, as soon as I was elected Governor, in fact I asked the Lt. Governor – I think you had just written a book – I said could we do something around your book, maybe have you come down and talk about it at Government House over a dinner or something, and she said “Well that’s very kind and very nice of you, but instead I would like you to know what Dr. Gallo’s doing and I would like to bring the people down from the Institute,” so that’s what we did.
I also want to thank Colonel Weina and also our friends from Perfectus and also Sanofi Pasteur and really all of you for taking the time to be here today. I especially want to thank all of you who represent in some way the tremendously powerful, forward-moving, healing consortium of organizations who are going to be funding this next critically important stage of this research. And especially, let’s give it up for the Gates Foundation, who generously donated the majority of the funds as part of this consortium
Defeating HIV/AIDS
Through your generosity and vision, you are making this place, not only a beacon of hope, but a real powerful force of healing, that makes us understand that we are all part of something bigger than ourselves by being here today. When on occasion people, as Chancellor Kirwan just did, say kind things about the job I’ve been able to do on your behalf as mayor, excuse me, as Governor – it’s a hard habit to break – I immediately fire back when people are kind enough to say you’re doing a good job, I say sincerely and very quickly that I work for good people. And I do work for good people. And all of us understand that our goodness is the product of choices. And what we do and what we choose not to do, the things we spend our lives doing—they matter. Not just to us and our immediately families, but they matter to people all around us. There is a beautiful Talmudic saying that if you save just one life it is as if you have saved the world.
Imagine the lives that we have the ability, the potential, the blessing to be able to touch through the great work that Dr. Redfield, Dr. Blatner, Dr. Gallo, and all of you here at the Institute are doing. The poet tells us to “hope for a great-sea-change; On the far side of revenge; Believe that a farther shore Is reachable from here; Believe in miracles; And cures and healing wells.”
Well in Maryland, and here at the Institute of Human Virology, we do believe in miracles, and we do believe in cures, and we do believe in healing wells. Put another way, we believe in the work of Dr. Gallo and his team. And today we are on the verge of a major breakthrough in the fight against HIV/AIDS,… a fight that has come with a particular ferociousness and speed to this very place, the original land of the free and home of the brave of Baltimore, Maryland, and a devastation that has swept across this whole planet and whole continents. The men and women who work in the labs all around us have come up with a unique and promising immunogen that has the potential to become a preventive vaccine for AIDS.
So—we are here to announce that a consortium has pledged more than $23 million to move this research forward.
Here in Maryland, the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic is something that has hit us hard. And there’s no way to sugarcoat it: even though we’re ranked number 1 for the percentage of PhD’s, we are number 4 in terms of AIDS cases that are reported, in terms of reported rates. Since the beginning of this epidemic, we have lost 18,000 of our neighbors to this disease. That is six times the number that were killed in the attacks of September 11th. As we speak, there are more than 29,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in our State. To put it into context, that’s nearly the entire population of College Park.
Conclusion
And yet at the same time, some of the key breakthroughs in the fight are happening here. We’re a long way from winning this fight, but we’re moving forward by harnessing the healing potential of our State’s greatest asset – and that is the talents, the creativity, and the imagination of one of the most diverse group of people that have ever come together around this challenge.
Perhaps we are that archetypal wounded healer, in a way, Baltimore and Maryland. Perhaps it is somehow in our chosen course to be that force that discovers a cure for this terrible disease; to be the generous, revolutionary and caring people we are called to be; to be a moral leader of this stressed and challenged, and too often very very saddened tragic world; to be a force for healing, and to be a force for goodness; and to be that force that unlocks in the words of Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, “the weapons of mass salvation.” Thanks very much.
