The amount of ‘HIV cures’ compared to drugs that actually hit the market are disproportionate. I don’t fully know what causes trials to fail but I would assume failure rate is pretty substantial, so I won’t hold my breath.
COVID and influenza are much easier, because the human immune system can fight off those viruses reasonably effectively and most people recover. A vaccine just has to replicate having had the disease and recovered.
Here's an article from The Lancet on the many COVID vaccines using this approach now in test.[2]
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-developing-hiv...
Really?
Influenza mutates and mostly escapes natural immunity all the time. Essentially everyone has had the flu and recovered, and a lot of people (and almost all children?) have been vaccinated. Yet the flu still circulates. The whole point of this new vaccine candidate is to produce better protection than natural immunity or the current vaccine.
COVID is so new that the endgame isn’t really known, but reinfections with different variants seem to be fairly common. Certainly the other (non-COVID) human coronaviruses reinfect humans regularly. (They account for 1/3 of common colds by estimates I’ve seen, and there are only four of them. The average person gets many more than 12 colds in their life.)
You're right, it does, and the parent comment is also right that your immune system will fight it and win again most of the time.
HIV is special because your body will fight it, but lose the battle given enough time. The Human Immunodeficiency Virus targets your immune system, and gradually weakens it until you can't fight even common fungus spores.
COVID storms the gates and the soldiers fight it back, HIV sneaks into the castle and attacks the barracks in a war of attrition.
[1] https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2020/04/hiv-hides-in-imm....
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex_virus#Immune_ev...
...yet