Clinton’s New Goal: A Vaccine For Aids

President Clinton today plans to set a national goal of finding a vaccine to prevent AIDS within 10 years and will pledge new efforts by the federal government to make it happen, administration officials said.

In a speech this morning, Clinton will liken the search for a vaccine to immunize people against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, to John F. Kennedy’s challenge in the early 1960s to put a man on the moon by the end of that decade, according to people familiar with his text.

To reach this ambitious end, Clinton is announcing some comparatively modest means. The most concrete is the creation of a new AIDS vaccine research center at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda.