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Comment by mirkules | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder how they actually test if a vaccine against lethal diseases is successful in humans. I can't imagine there are volunteers who sign up to be injected with a vaccine and then get injected with a live HIV virus, just to see if the vaccine works. Or do they just inoculate volunteers from the highest "at-risk" population -- but then, how do they measure if people have been exposed eventually to the virus or not?

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You do double blind against a placebo with an at risk group. Then in X years you look at infection rates with survey data to complement it.

If I understand this correctly, it's all about finding a best-fit model for the change in infection rates after X amount of years. There could be a number of factors at play (environmental, political, religious), but the "correct" cause of change will stick out like a sore thumb.

When I was in university, the university hospital used to do a lot of medicine trials. Basically, you get paid to be a guinea pig.

They did several experiments for HIV drugs. The details are fuzzy, but if I remember correctly, they create a replica of the HIV virus that is totally harmless, but has the same outer cell layer (and reacts to the same chemicals as the real HIV would), and then infect you with that. This allows them to test the interactions with drugs, without giving people real HIV.

After the tests, you receive a certificate saying you are forever HIV positive according to some tests, but that it is a false positive, and using test X it can be verified that you're not really HIV positive. This was important for future medical operations and getting into certain countries that ban HIV-positive people.

Needless to say, you got a lot of money to do these fake HIV experiments.

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