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Comment by greggsy | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t prep more like a prophylactic, as opposed to a a vaccine?

I’m more familiar with malaria, where the preventative medicines are currently more effective than the vaccines.

The analogy to malaria is pretty on point. Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) is, you nailed it, prophylactic. It's not as good as a vaccine would be, and it's not as cheap as a one-and-done shot, but we've gotten to the point where you can get one shot every six months (lenacapavir) and, it's 99%+ effective at preventing infection. And, much like with malaria, the prophylaxis works— there is currently no HIV vaccine that reliably prevents infection.

"Prophylactic" is a broad-enough word to encompass vaccines, as well, so I'm not sure what you're getting at. It just means something that defends against disease.

Vaccines can be singled out as a specific type of prophylaxis.

The distinction is that a vaccine will train your immune system to actively destroy the foreign body, while a prophylactics might just prevent it from spreading or taking hold to begin with.

I have no idea what you're trying to say. An antiviral drug will destroy the pathogen just as much as the body would; that's how it prevents the disease from manifesting. What do you think would otherwise happen to HIV particles in your bloodstream? They just hang in there until the antiviral effects run out?

The difference is that your body doesn’t make antiviral drugs. It does make antibodies after it has been trained to do so with a vaccine.

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