How would this vaccine work for people who are already infected?
The idea behind a vaccine is the give the immune system a sample before it encounters the real virus, which allows it to respond quicker when the real virus arrives, which allows it to prevent the virus to replicate sufficiently to make the person sick.
For someone who already has the virus, the vaccine won't do anything.
Also for some viruses (again see covid-19), it's still advisable to get a vaccine even if you've already been infected. The protection rate and longevity of the vaccines can outweigh infection based antibodies dramatically.
In the case of HIV, it's potentially quite different, because HIV is such a unique disease, that yeah, a vaccine might not help anyway. But otherwise, your comment doesn't apply to vaccines in general (and it didn't seem like you were replying towards any specifics of HIV)
The difference with mRNA vaccines is they let your body build antibodies without it even knowing the virus itself
Many of the patterns associated with long covid suggest that is a mix of one condition that has a mechanism probably similar to chronic fatigue syndrome and the other is the manifestation of long term sequelae that is common with other respiratory viruses.
My guess is that the vaccine might help with the CFS-like symptoms.
By what possible mechanism? Does this imply that long COVID is a result of some small amount of lingering virus?
I was under the impression that long COVID was a result of damage caused by the initial infection - not some continuous infection of the actual virus.
This is different from other disease where the immune system doesn't have enough time to response before the disease kills/damages the body.
If the vaccine can prevent HIV signature evasion, it may very well help control/treat the disease, I think.
What you said applies to most viruses (flu, corona, ...), but not to HIV.
There is a reason we failed to create a HIV vaccine for 30 years, and that reason is that simply presenting the virus just doesn't work.
So this vaccine uses a new quite amazing methodology, instead of presenting the virus, it presents something else designed to trigger the 1 in the million B cell from our bodies which are actually capable of producing a neutralizing antibody. Regular vaccine trigger randomly the other 999999 B cells which produce useless antibodies.
Typically that process takes 10 years for a HIV infected person, after which they produce the proper antibodies.
This approach is called germ-line targeting, and tries to accelerate that 10 year process in 2-3 shots.