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Comment by gameswithgo | Hacker News Reader

The covid-19 vaccines were very effective at preventing disease and spread until the omicron mutation, which perhaps wouldn't have happened if not for vaccine hesitancy. (but that is an inevitable human nature thing, so you have to accept it and deal with)

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.

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Come on, this isn't true. Even with delta the waning efficacy had become obvious in those countries that vaccinated early, with all time high infections in jurisdictions that were virtually completely vaccinated (e.g. Israel, Waterford). One study estimated 211 days until protection vs infection was statistically indistinguishable from someone who was not vaccinated (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3949410).

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.

As much as I'd like to blame them, the number of people who willingly refused the vaccine are irrelevant compared to those who do not have access to it.

This is a valid point, but I think ignores amount of public health resources "spent" on trying to address vaccine hesitancy and healthcare resources addressing "unnecessary" hospitalization and complications.

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.

HIV doesn’t mutate in the same way a disease like Covid does, at least not at the same speed— also, PrEP has existed for years. It’s still proven to be effective protection against contracting HIV even if directly exposed (though it’s a pill that must be taken every day rather than a vaccine).

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).

It's nephrotoxic over long periods of time. Condoms arent.

My GF and I, both Moderna double vaxxed, were exposed to Covid last year. Same place, same time, she got it, I did not.

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).

... and yet the HIV virus is notoriously terribly difficult to develop a vaccine against. It mutates easily and you don't have a natural antibody response that is easy to trigger. Like one of the top comments I really wish some expert would enter the discussion and explain what exactly are our expectations.

> The covid-19 vaccines were very effective at preventing disease and spread until the omicron mutation, which perhaps wouldn't have happened if not for vaccine hesitancy.

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.

Please many countries like Israel were lit up with delta after being touted as the poster boy for “vaccinations” in June 21. Stop the nonsense. The data is clear, the effectiveness diminishes after 3 months. You can’t vaccinate your way out of a pandemic with pathetically leaky “vaccine”

But, HIV mutates super easily, which is why we do not already have a more traditional vaccine that works. It will be a greater challenge in this regard than COVID-19/Omicron, not an easier one.

Two observations:

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.

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