By the arcane calculus of county politics, Peter Kerndt’s National Institutes of Health grant caused a lot more than $1.5 million-per-annum’s worth of trouble. That’s why, though it promised to facilitate research to cure the world’s most widespread deadly disease, the County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday officially voted the project it supported out of existence.Kerndt’s grant was to fund research that could have been a milestone on the path toward the discovery of an autoimmune-deficiency virus vaccine – the Holy Grail of modern medicine. The problem was that Kerndt apparently didn’t handle his office and local politics as well as he did his research-grant proposal.The politics are those of race and county bureaucracy. Kerndt’s task was not to test a proposed vaccine, but to compile a potential pool of possible volunteer subjects for such a test, most of them people of color. Down the road, however – and here we’re talking at least 10 years – like most other vaccines (influenza, polio and smallpox, for example), any AIDS vaccine would contain portions of the disease virus’ components. That’s how a vaccine works – by introducing the body’s immune system to a nonlethal portion of a disease organism in order to teach it to develop a resistance to the entire organism.