Kind of a rabbit hole but I found this to be interesting.
NYT article from 4/3/79.
The first large‐scale American trial of a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease is expected to begin next month, according to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The disease is hepatitis type B, and the vaccine trial will be conducted among homosexual men in five cities Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, St. Louis and San Francisco.
Approval for the trial was based in part on a recent study showing that hepatitis B infections apparently were far more common than suspected among homosexual men. Evidence of past infection was as high as 58 percent in San Francisco.
Another trial of a hepatitis vaccine among homosexual men is being conducted by the New York Blood Center. In the five‐city trial, as many as 3,000 homosexual men will receive two injections of either an experimental vaccine or a placebo, a dummy vaccine. Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research in West Point, Pa., prepared the experimental vaccine, and most investigators in the trial are from the Federal Center for Disease Control in Atlanta.
You can read the rest of the article
here.
The first AIDS diagnosis would be 1981 which kicked off the HIV/AIDS epidemic for the next decade.