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Comment by betterunix2 | Hacker News Reader

AIDS killed a million people in 2016. HIV medications help only when taken diligently, which is actually problematic even in developed countries where the most advanced treatments are available, and is much more difficult in poorer countries. Even with treatment HIV infections are a burden on people, interfering with normal adult activities like sex (convincing people to use condoms is a challenge) and having children.

To quote Seven of Nine, survival is insufficient. We could survive without a vaccine or a treatment, it would mean tens of thousands of years and billions of people dying from AIDS until our species adapts and HIV becomes just another retrovirus (as some other primate species have with related SIV viruses). We should aim higher than "survival" and end the suffering caused by HIV, and with a vaccine we could do so in this century.

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No, just no.

AIDS killed 700,000 in 2020.[1]. That’s worldwide. It’s not even in the top 10.

Diarrheal diseases, entirely preventable with clean water supply, kill three times as many.[2]

Or heart disease which killed ten times as many.

[1] https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet [2] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...

...what exactly is your point? That other preventable illnesses exist and kill more people, therefore an HIV vaccine is uninteresting? That 700k dead does not justify the effort to eradicate HIV, and that we should just continue to rely on long-term treatment regiments?

Does nobody read comments before replying?

My entire statement was “we don’t need an AIDS vaccine to survive as the human race”.

If AIDS was risking our survival than diarrheal diseases should as well?

I'm pretty sure the person you're responding to is very in favor of eliminating deaths from diarrhea and heart disease as well. Why would advocating for an AIDS vaccine imply otherwise?

You didn’t read my comment either!

I think he was pointing that massive dollars have gone for AIDS research but it is not what should be our high priority compared to other death causes. In America and world both, AIDS is small fries for death cause.

> In America and world both, AIDS is small fries for death cause.

The critical distinction is outcomes: until relatively recently, the only outcome of an HIV infection was eventual death from AIDS. This is still the default outcome in most of the world.

Plenty of things kill more people than AIDS, but most of them have substantially less severe individual outcomes: many people survive them, or the social/political solutions are substantially more tenable (healthier eating, access to potable water). And that's even before we consider how AIDS research has advanced the field of medical virology as a whole.

That is a really difficult call to make because research into HIV/AIDS has generated a great deal of information about viruses and potential ways of treating or controlling them. This is similar to the arguments about the space program being an expensive and largely irrelevant exercise even though all sorts of critical technology for weather satellites, solar power, electronic communications and so on came more or less directly from exploration and development of space.

By that logic we shouldn't use a vaccine for most illnesses since they are not heart disease...

After all, we are only saving a small cities worth of people per year.

Is heart disease risking survival of the human race?

Shall we stop bothering about the past 1000 years of medical advances while we're at it, since the human race was surviving fine without?

What point are you actually trying to make?

Why does something have to be full-on existential threat to humanity to qualify for research/development/treatment?

It doesn’t? I never said that.

Is this a serious comment? We shouldn't stop a cause of death because it's not in the top ten?

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