These papers were rapidly assembled with the help of Ronald Bayer as guest editor, a task I invited him to assume once his own commentary had been accepted. The trials at issue aimed to establish alternatives to the now-standard US regimen for reducing vertical HIV transmission. The controversy, which erupted in 1997, was brought to a resolution of sorts on February 18, 1998.
Critical issues remain, and new ones arise.
The embargo on placebo trials, although not spelled out in detail, seems misguided. First, this encouraging result could not have been achieved without a placebo arm, as the CDC press release itself observes. The same result would follow for any other modification of the standard regimen so far proposed. Second, the success of the Thai study is but one result, and it is one with wide confidence limits. One would have thought the not-infrequent reversals and failed replications of trial results are, in the HIV field, sufficiently recent and bitter to have stayed judgment.