Straight from the TB meeting last week, I’ve been at a HIV keystone meeting all week that has two parallel tracks — one focusing on the molecular aspects of the disease and the other on strategies for making a vaccine.

The big question on everyone’s lips is, why is no one from the biggest HIV vaccine project here?

In 2005, NIH created CHAVI, a $350 million behemoth led by a small group of scientists. With that kind of money at stake, particularly at a time when funding is tight, many scientists were understandably outraged — so much so that it seemed like it might split the field into bitter, warring factions.

This meeting tells me that sadly, it already has.

Last year, we reported researchers’ fears that CHAVI was cutting into individual grants. Two years into CHAVI almost no one, including some people at the NIH, has anything good to say about it. The project has already taken up about $70 million, and judging by CHAVI leader Bart Haynes’ presentation yesterday, doesn’t have much that’s new to show for it. Haynes says most of the first year went toward setting up collaborations and infrastructure — and that may be true. But why isn’t his team here to share what they’re doing with the rest of the field? Even Haynes flew in just for his talk and flew back the same night, which didn’t really give people much time to interact with him or ask questions.

The coffee breaks are rife with rumors that even though four fabulous teams applied for the CHAVI grant, the NIH had decided months before who they would give the grant to — and that the decision was entirely political. People are also saying that any project grant that competes with CHAVI’s domain automatically gets rejected.

This being a particularly gossipy community, there’s little proof of any of this — grants may be getting rejected simply because these are tough times, for example — but it almost doesn’t matter whether it’s true. The point is, many of the scientists here are feeling betrayed by the NIH’s decision to fund CHAVI and worse, afraid of what they see as its favoritism.

This cannot be good for the field. Far as I can see, if the NIH doesn’t soon make an effort to be more open — and more inclusive — about what CHAVI is doing, this important field will split into the CHAVits and the CHAV-nots.