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.
No one in this thread knows anything about vaccines or infectious disease. Each organism is different and requires a detailed understanding to see what the potential for the vaccine is. You can't just take COVID-19's performance and project that onto another disease. mRNA allows the targeting of specific proteins. The efficacy of the T-cell and B-cell responses are going to be highly dependent on that protein's structure, its importance and level of conservation in the pathogen, and other factors.
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.
…or it totally could, if it primes T-cells to fully clear the infection, or keep it to such a low level that the viral load is minimized.
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.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted all much… well actually no it’s pretty obvious.
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.
I think it's just the speed at which it has happened though. Most children born in developed countries today receive a slew of vaccines which will provide immunity to catching those diseases for decades. It's discouraging that we're looking at shot no. 4 for the mRNA covid vaccines within a year and a half, and despite even that, infection rates are still very strong.
Because corona viruses are a different kind. There have been no vaccines against them so far and we saw how strongly they mutate. Still, the 3-shot regime seems to be very effective against severe disease. They probably deliver as much protection as possible unless you have a vaccine which targets exactly the strain you are fighting. So it will be interesting how the omicron-specific vaccines will do, if they do get used for larger campaigns.
Thanks for the breaks analogy, it’s one I intend on using when talking to people I. The real world. It’s a good one given how basically everyone has either dealt with or understands this basic yet essential car maintenance issue and the nature of the appropriate response.
At least they don't make them from asbestos anymore.
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.
OEM might not be asbestos but aftermarket asbestos containing pad can be bought. Who knows that the material does that's in them today?
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.
because the point he's making is wrong. Vaccines are doing a fantastic job at slowing down the progression of the virus which is key to keep mutations at bay. No vaccine is 100% effective, but even 80% effectiveness radically changes the dynamic of a pandemic, it's so easy to see that I don't understand what can lead someone to deny this fact besides bad faith.
I think you may want to revisit your 80%. The vaccine efficacy for sterilization of the virus ended up dropping more quickly than expected and that's even with pre-Delta variants. Look at the Israel data. When you don't understand, I suspect what you are encountering isn't bad faith actors, but more informed people.
But here you're talking about efficacy against infection and mild disease, which is not so relevant if we're talking about preventing new strains. New strains are thought to evolve in immunocompromised people with high viral loads over long periods of time, which allows both many mutations to occur as well as for those mutations to become dominant. So I believe the question should be to what extent the vaccines help prevent serious disease in people with comorbidities - and the answer is that they help to a great extent (whether 70% or 90%).
I seriously doubt it. Show me your "israel data" and tell me how that changes the situation, because I don't believe you and you come with nothing but name calling.
Exactly. The COVID vaccines have been proven over and over again to reliably prevent serious illness across the original strain and every variant of concern we’ve seen since then. The fact that they initially also largely prevented infection against the original strain was a bonus that scientists were never counting on.
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
I wholeheartedly agree, I downvoted the comment because it appeared to be made in bad faith (and from another comment I posted on this topic, I obviously share the concern that this HIV vaccine may lose efficacy over time).
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.
There's a difference between "someone" and "no one" and "everyone". Someone with an engineering education should be able to understand that very easily, it's a shame you don't.
The Covid-19 vaccines were made against the original strain in which it was 95% effective. Let's see how the updated Omicron vaccine goes. I am guessing we are going to see above 90% effectiveness. mRNA vaccines are looking pretty promising at neutralizing the specific virus they are targeting. How effective that is for mutated and related viruses is what remains to be seen.
Wouldn't it depend more on how well-chosen the target protein is? If it mutates too fast the vaccine won't be as effective. This says nothing about the effectiveness of the mRNA technique though, which seems to reliable induce an immune response to the target protein.
PREP already gives you good prevention for this to work it needs to be both a therapeutic vaccine at least at stages at which PEP is no longer effective as well and or as being at least as effective as PREP whilst being more cost effective as an overall treatment.
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.
what makes you think so? how could the market for this be greater than the market for the covid vaccine? the number of people susceptible to covid is much greater than the number of people susceptible to HIV.
but surely more people would say "my lifestyle choices mean that I'm never going to be exposed to HIV so I don't need a vaccine for it" than ditto for covid?
sure but the set of all people who engage in frequent unprotected sex so as to be possibly susceptible to HIV is strictly smaller than the set of all people who could be possibly affected by covid.
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.
well, hopefully that market demand results in getting a drug that is more than adequate at what it's supposed to do, because I'd imagine the consequences would be much worse.
I would be really worried with false sense of security when dealing with HIV/AIDS... Covid in the end is a mild thing, same can't really be said about HIV/AIDS. And if the protection is only temporary and partially it might be worse than having nothing at all if it leads to lot more risk taking.
Why did you get flagged when you are absolutely correct. Why would you think that mRNA vaccines, which failed for so many years in testing, would presto work this time. and they clearly didn’t work this time, unless you drone around mumbling how thank god your symptoms would have been worse without it.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Not if it's anything like the Covid-19 vaccines that don't stop someone from contracting or spreading it.