Dr. Bonaventura Clotet has devoted his life to fighting infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS and Covid-19. When the Covid-19 virus first reached Barcelona in early 2020, Dr. Bonaventura Clotet was more prepared than anyone. As a world authority in HIV, and founder and head of both the Fight AIDS Foundation and the IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute, Dr. Clotet swung into action. While around the world politicians debated, dithered and denied the obvious, he immediately set about deploying his almost 45 years of experience in fighting infection and disease.
“A global pandemic was clearly on the way,” Clotet says. “It was ridiculous that many people didn’t consider SARS-CoV-2 to be a serious threat. One of the lessons of Covid-19 is that we should never underestimate a new disease just because it comes from a country far away from us.”
Covid-19 was not the first pandemic that Clotet had faced. Some 40 years ago, the world was struggling to contain the threat of a new disease that took a very different form. Less infectious than airborne Covid-19 but more deadly, HIV/AIDS took the lives of millions of mainly young people before the development of antiretroviral treatments turned the tide.
“I still remember the names of my early patients and how they would stare at me and plead for help,” says Clotet, who had the opportunity to meet Spain’s first AIDS sufferer in 1981. “At the beginning patients usually had a life expectancy of less than two years.”
When Covid-19 arrived in Spain, the parallels with HIV were clear. An unknown virus with a high mortality rate – and with no vaccine and no recognized treatment — began to spread panic among the population. Clotet lost no time switching much of his research infrastructure to studying the new virus.
Just as in the early years of HIV, Clotet also devoted major efforts to raising funds to study the new virus and develop suitable treatments. A crowdfunding effort called #YoMeCorono and backed by local car-maker SEAT, a long-time Clotet partner, raised millions of euros to finance studies of Covid-19.
“That seed money was crucial for speeding up the initial steps of research,” Clotet says. “We ran many clinical trials to demonstrate the efficacy or not of drugs such as hydroxychloroquine that were being used worldwide without any confirmation of real activity.
“We are also using research funded by #YoMeCorono to assess the long-term duration of the neutralizing antibodies generated with the disease, with the vaccines, or with both, focusing on vulnerable populations.”
“The money wasted in absurd wars would be enough to vaccinate the entire world against SARS-CoV-2 and control the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Dr. Bonaventura Clotet
The current top priorities of Clotet’s researchers are: developing vaccines for Covid-19 and HIV, strategies to eradicate HIV, new molecules and repurposed drugs for SARS-CoV-2 and therapies for long Covid.
Despite new hope for AIDS prevention and the decrease in the mortality rate for Covid-19 in the developed world to a level similar to that for influenza, Clotet sounds a cautionary note.
“Because SARS-CoV-1 emerged in 2002 and lasted two years, the world could have had a vaccine ready to use before the Covid-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2, but it did not invest in developing vaccines and therapies for diseases in animals that were at risk of jumping to humans,” he says.
“It is crazy that Covid could have been prevented but wasn’t. We have to stop making the same mistakes. We have to invest to prevent diseases and help humanity stay one step ahead.”
As published in TIME magazine.
