> We could be getting even closer to stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Not if it's anything like the Covid-19 vaccines that don't stop someone from contracting or spreading it.
Not if it's anything like the Covid-19 vaccines that don't stop someone from contracting or spreading it.
if someone has HIV, they can be treated and if they are consistent with treatment they can have such a low (undetectable) viral load that it is not transmittable. (aka U=U)
additionally, high risk populations (transactional sex, msm, intravenous drug users) can take the same drugs and be protected from the virus. (aka PREP)
also people with known exposures or likely exposures can have post exposure prophylaxis with the same drugs (e.g. in the case of an accidental needle stick in a healthcare worker).
These defenses have already radically slowed the spread and increased the lifespan and quality of life of those who become HIV positive.
Now we will hopefully have a an additional defense that will be even easier (no daily dosing required for negative at-risk population) and probably much more broadly administered.
I love the progress we are making with vaccines.
COVID-19 seems to require a persistently high level of neutralizing anti-bodies and the T-cell response seems to be less important (and also plays a role in auto-immunity). On the plus side, the wild-type vaccine has continued to be fairly effective against even highly mutated Omicron which is surprisingly good even if strategically, it is suboptimal that the virus has continued to mutate and evade the vaccine to ever greater degrees.
HIV has a tremendous latency period. It lurks for a long time before symptom onset. If a vaccine doesn't provide sterilizing immunity, but does prime T-lymphocytes to clear the virus, or keep it to an extremely low viral load, it would make people substantially less likely to spread the virus, or have symptomatic progression to AIDS.
This is, of course, easier said than done.
https://www.aidsmap.com/about-hiv/search-hiv-prevention-vacc...
I think you’re right though. The current Covid-19 vaccines are proven to lose efficacy over time. Will the same thing happen with this one as well? It’s a good question.
Also, it's not hard to see how a vaccine for HIV would be much more effective at slowing pandemic progression than a vaccine for an airborne virus, even if the vaccines conferred the same benefits. Right now, if you get HIV, you are essentially contagious for life until you get on antiretrovirals that can bring your viral load to undetectable (and, you also need to be on those antiretrovirals for life). If an HIV vaccine prevented you from having a long term infection, it could potentially fully end the pandemic.
Now, just because omicron is better at driving breakthrough infections, that fact is being used in bad faith by some who now say the vaccines “don’t work”, even though they are still as effective at preventing serious illness
Let's see what you got.
If you think they're right you may not understand why the comment is being down voted.
> The current Covid-19 vaccines are proven to lose efficacy over time. Will the same thing happen with this one as well?
Like with any vaccine: Probably.
> It’s a good question
It's pretty besides the point. To recycle my car brakes analogy: They also lose efficacy over time, yet are widely considered to be useful.
My dad tells me about taking shop class in high school, and they'd be sanding down asbestos brake pads with an angle grinder to remove the high spots to prevent glazing. No masks of course.
I'm generally surprised by what I was exposed to at shop class, not necessarily asbestos but machines that could absolutely wreck a body let loose by a bunch of haphazard children. Blinding lights, kids sticking like 4 inches of iron into a hydraulic cutting machine and hitting go. A girl cut her finger off on a bandsaw.
I imagine that depends much more on the virus than on the vaccine.
Also there is no chance that this would have a higher adoption rate than COVID unless it turns out to give 100% life time immunity and would end up being part of the National vaccination program world wide.
This likely would have the same usage as PREP/PEP today so at risk individuals and a post exposure treatment.
I think most people see it as “covid = bad cold; HIV = death”.
I'm not sure how we're lost in translation here, so I'll try to express this another way.
I think the majority of sexually promiscuous adults aren't particularly concerned about COVID infection, because the likelihood that they'll die from it is low. If they do catch it, they will most likely recover without long-term damage.
I think those same adults however are indeed concerned about HIV infection, because it is [so far] incurable, and has an enormous social stigma attached to it, and without constant treatment will eventually kill you.
The number of people who would benefit from a drug against COVID is larger than those who would benefit from a drug against HIV, however, of those who would buy either drug, I think the latter drug is the one that would have much higher market demand because of just how consequential an infection with that disease is.
As a matter of fact, the “trials’ during warp speed were so flawed to show efficacy it is pathetic. But these tech geeks here know better.
Fortunately the vaccines were still very effective at preventing death and hospitalization with omicron, I wonder how many lives were saved overall, so far? It is really quite remarkable.
Given the slower way HIV spreads we have a much better chance at actually getting rid of it. Its not flying around in the air mutating in a billion people at once every day.
1. Given the continued efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines against severe illness, it stands to (lay-)reason that a similar outcome might occur with HIV. A world in which HIV is roughly as transmissible as it currently is (and is still responsive to other avenues of treatment/prevention, like PrEP) but where it does not cause fatal immunocompromization is an extremely preferable world.
2. We have no particular reason to believe that HIV's mutation vectors are more or less susceptible to the vectors that mRNA vaccines target, versus "traditional" vaccines.
Now imagine we could cut the above in half, and then use some fraction of those savings (as a nation) promoting wider adoption of vaccines globally. If we've reached higher levels of vaccination earlier (in the USA), more people without access to the vaccine currently would've been able to get it.
I honestly don’t know why everyone who is sexually active isn’t on PrEP (the federal government even mandates it be free to those without insurance in most cases)— it should be as common practice as wearing a condom and birth control, yet its existence isn’t even known to many people (especially among straight people).
And how can you possibly speculate that a vaccine evasive mutation is the fault of the unvaccinated? While we can only guess, the evolutionary pressure is obvious: a vast number of hosts available to the first variant that can defeat the narrow immunity against the spike protein. We created a monoculture, with all the attendant risks.
I'm happy to piss in the coffee of vaccine hesitants any day of the week (point me to the mug), but we can't blame the variants on vaccine hesitancy.
Both delta and omicron originated in unvaccinated populations in the developing world, where the problem is not vaccine hesitancy [1], but the lack of availability of vaccines [2].
[1] Delta arose before any vaccines were approved, and yes, of course, there's vaccine hesitancy in South Africa, but there's also, simply put, not enough vaccines to go around.
[2] For some mysterious reason, our economic planners thought that getting the developed world inoculated in 2021, and the developing world in 2022 was a smart plan. It wasn't, but now we're reaping the consequences of it. I eagerly await the next variant.
I still quarantined the whole time but not a sniffle, no fever, multiple negative covid tests for myself.
If the HIV vaccine works, some people will still get HIV given enough exposure at just the right time, for instance, undergoing cancer treatment notoriously wrecks your immune system, so you might be at risk even with a vaccine then.
You can still get the mumps and measles and everything else you've been vaccinated against given the right circumstances, but you do have far more protection against it than without the vaccines, and in an ideal world where every person was completely vaccinated and any sources of animal to human exposure were eliminated, then should your immune system suffer a setback there wouldn't be anything around you to take advantage of your weakness.
That is what herd immunity is, which was never supposed to be "if 90% of the population is vaccinated then the other 10% are safe" (which is a whole different story).