so, i was just wondering....

[rae121452]

a number of vaccines have been developed for covid-19 in less than a year. yet, 40+ years on, no one seems any closer to a vaccine for hiv. i wonder why?

 

[butters]

apparently, it's due to 2 things: how rapidly it mutates and how there's no recorded human having developed immunities to HIV and so, since vaccines tend to inspire the body to produce antibodies, there's been no possibility of replicating them. not sure if all this info is still up to date but here:

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-...rison-to-hiv-cancer-common-cold-idUSKBN28L2CF

HIV/AIDS
As of 2017, half of all people living with HIV worldwide are receiving antiretroviral treatment, also known as ART (here). HIV.gov explains that when “people living with HIV achieve and maintain viral suppression by taking HIV medication daily as prescribed, they can stay healthy and have effectively no risk of sexually transmitting HIV to their partners.”

Finding an HIV vaccine has been challenging because the virus “mutates rapidly and has unique ways of evading the immune system,” according to the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) (here). While typical vaccines imitate recovered patients’ immune response, “there are no documented cases of a person living with HIV developing an immune response that cleared the infection.”

While vaccines are usually inactivated or weakened viruses, “inactivated HIV was not effective at eliciting immune responses in clinical trials” and “a live form of HIV is too dangerous to use” (here).

Using the same technique as Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, a new investigational HIV vaccine from Moderna relies on messenger RNA (mRNA) to activate the immune system against the virus (here).

 

[phrodeau]

Vaccines work by strengthening the immune system. HIV goes straight to the immune system and knocks it out, no matter how strong it is.