It's being downvoted because it's such an incredibly ignorant statement that is doing nothing but perpetrating conspiracy theories.
If the OP had done even a little bit of research, they would have quickly realized that AIDS has unique properties that makes making a vaccine incredibly complicated despite a ton of effort that has gone into it so far.
In my experience the people who make claims like the OP's almost invariably know nothing about either biology, drug development, or big pharma. But the amount of disinformation circling the whole drug price debate has always been epic.
Run the numbers on all HIV patients requiring perpetual treatment versus a vaccine slowly eliminating the virus from the population over 5,10 and 20 years.
Vaccines are not a great business model compared to the latter. Analogous to the dearth of Antibiotic research currently. Other drugs like statins for example are much more profitable due to perpetual use requirement.
Where would you invest the companies resources if you were running the show? And make no mistake. The resources are finite when you are charged with growing multi tens of billions of annual revenue. Miss by 5% and your head rolls and your stock options are upside down.
So place your bets wisely.
You do realize that vaccines can be incredibly profitable in some cases? Pfizer’s Prenvar sold $5.8B in 2017. That easily exceeds many chronic treatments.
And I would argue that an AIDS vaccine, like Gilead’s cure for HCV, could be priced quite aggressively.
A chronic treatment does not suggest a continued stream of revenue as competitors often enter the market with 2nd generation products.
That's a good number for a globally marketable product.
I read that Genoya for AIDS generated $4.8B USD in 2018 and Truvada, by the same company, Gilead, generated another $3B USD. So that's almost $8B per year and Truvada has a 3 year CAGR of 82% so it's really grabbing market share.
To your point there are other companies with competitive products but Gilead seems to be the leader.
My point is simply that one model, drugs at 8B per year, assumes a continuous disease state while the other at 5B per year assumes a continuous reduction in diseased hosts as was seen with Polio, Smallpox and until recently +measles for example.
One is better for the corporation. The other better for the commons. That's all I got.
+Measles was declared eradicated, in the USA, early in this century.
If the OP had done even a little bit of research, they would have quickly realized that AIDS has unique properties that makes making a vaccine incredibly complicated despite a ton of effort that has gone into it so far.