Reinstatement of AIDS Researcher Demanded

Less than a week after his client was placed on 30 days’ administrative leave, a lawyer for Los Angeles County’s chief epidemiologist demanded Wednesday that Dr. Peter Kerndt be immediately reinstated, and flatly denied that the physician failed to inform his superiors of his participation in a federal study designed to pave the way for testing potential AIDS vaccines.

In a letter sent to county Health Services Director Mark Finucane, lawyer James P. Cooper III also wrote that Kerndt is entitled to a public apology from the department’s officials so he can clear his “name, standing in the medical community and reputation.”

The letter, and a thick stack of supporting documents sent to Finucane, mark Kerndt’s first public response since Friday, when the health director charged that the doctor improperly committed the county--and its resources--to the federally financed study without getting approval from his superiors.

In his response, Kerndt’s lawyer not only asserts that his client did nothing wrong, but also says the doctor’s superiors in the health department knew exactly what he was doing when he won a National Institutes of Health grant in October.

That grant, worth at least $1.5 million, will allow Kerndt and his team of researchers based at County-USC Medical Center to lay the groundwork for future AIDS vaccine tests by finding high-risk minority men and women willing to participate in the medical trials.

“Clearly, Dr. Kerndt’s superiors were aware of his efforts at securing these [federal] grants regarding HIV testing and research,” Cooper wrote. “At that time, no one in senior management from [the health department] expressed any concern about Dr. Kerndt’s participation or [the department’s] role in the programs.”

In fact, Kerndt’s superiors in the agency formally congratulated him for securing the grant, according to a copy of a letter sent to Finucane as one of the documents supporting Kerndt’s demands.

In that Oct. 28 letter, Dr. James G. Haughton, the department’s medical director for public health programs and services, wrote to Kerndt, saying, “Dr. Donald C. Thomas [Finucane’s chief medical deputy] and I wish to congratulate you on your successful application to participate in the national study of HIV vaccines. . . .”

Finucane and Thomas declined to comment Wednesday, saying the issue may eventually end in litigation.

As recently as Tuesday, however, Finucane rejected the contention that Kerndt received approval to commit county resources to the project.

Health officials have not provided specifics on what those resources were.

But in a confidential report that led to his involuntary leave, investigators allege that Kerndt committed the county’s AIDS epidemiology center to the project, which they said was improper because he is doing the research not for the county but as part of a nonprofit consortium of County-USC doctors known as the Health Research Assn.

“This project should have been brought officially to the entire chain of command of the health department,” Finucane said in an interview Friday.

The health director has, however, told the Board of Supervisors that he is continuing to investigate the matter, particularly to see whether Kerndt’s superiors dropped the ball by not informing the department’s top officials of the project.

Through his lawyer, Kerndt also took exception to health officials’ remarks that he contributed to public anxiety among African Americans in South Los Angeles about the nature of the research he was conducting.

The controversy was touched off when an angry county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said she feared her poor African American constituents could be used as “human guinea pigs” in the AIDS vaccine research. She even likened it to the notorious Tuskegee study in which black males were allowed to develop end-stage syphilis in the 1940s so government scientists could research the progression of the disease.

Responding to Burke’s call for an investigation, acting county Public Health Director John Schunhoff alleged that Kerndt was at least partially at fault for the controversy because he failed to fully involve local AIDS activists in the research process. That, Schunhoff charged, allowed rumors to run rampant.

The health department’s subsequent investigation similarly said, “It appears that Dr. Kerndt has misrepresented and misled community representatives, elected officials, department management and the federal government.”

But correspondence produced Wednesday by Kerndt’s lawyer shows that the epidemiologist did involve a wide array of AIDS activists in the community.

Those letters demonstrate that Kerndt “received their unqualified support” at the earliest levels of the vaccine study, Cooper said in the letter to Finucane.

And he cited an Aug. 5 “site visit,” in which Kerndt brought county health officials and a group of community AIDS activists together to discuss the research.

As part of Kerndt’s demands, Cooper asked that efforts by Burke to halt the vaccine research project be stopped immediately, saying any delays or continued controversy could further jeopardize “Los Angeles’ continued participation in this important study.”

Meanwhile, a prominent AIDS epidemiologist came to Kerndt’s defense Wednesday, accusing Finucane of bowing to political pressure from a powerful boss--Burke--or to community pressure.

Dr. Donald Francis, former AIDS “czar” in California for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, described Kerndt as a committed researcher simply trying to secure a piece of a critically important AIDS research project now underway in cities across the nation.

“I don’t know what they are trying to do, but it certainly seems to be a personal thing against a very reasonable and good epidemiologist,” Francis said. “Finucane is playing politics, is what it sounds like. It’s a strange way to manage a department.”