Comments on: HIV vaccines: good news or bad?

By: elizabeth

elizabeth — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:13:39 +0000

Good question. By “we” I mean the General Public. But the implicit question is who is telling us this? And the answer is emphatically the AIDS industry. It is very difficult indeed to stand up at an AIDS conference, surrounded by peers and colleagues who have spent years working to reduce the stigma that has since the inception of the epidemic been attached to HIV because of its association with “unacceptable” behaviours, and say “people get HIV by ignoring what they know and having uprotected sex or sharing needles in any case”. One is usually accused of being stigmatising, and always accused of ignoring the fact that some people have limited or no choice about the behaviours that expose them to the virus.

By: Steve Smith

Steve Smith — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:04:37 +0000

When you say:
“We’re endlessly told that HIV is about poverty and underdevelopment and human rights. But in the pink neon of Asia’s red light districts, HIV is mostly about people doing dumb things in the pursuit of pleasure or money. We’re just not supposed to say so.”

Who’s not supposed to say so? Why? I’ve never heard anybody not talking about people doing dumb things in the pursuit of pleasure or money. Is it an ‘Asia thing’?

By: Daniel Reeders

Daniel Reeders — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:40:33 +0000

Brilliant post. Does a really nice job of explaining the analytical terms to an everyday reader.

By: elizabeth

elizabeth — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:59:20 +0000

Recieved from Mark VC, via e-mail:

C’mon it’s good news: not that this is the vaccine, which it isn’t, but that
there will, one day, be a vaccine. Both basic scientists and public health
boffins should be overjoyed about that! For so long it has been an open
question as to whether such efforts will ever succeed, with a lot of scientists
saying ‘no’. The Alvac/AIDSVAX combo will now be followed by every
conceivable permutation of it not already tried, and we’ll get a vaccine that
protects 50%, or something. Lighten up!

By: Muscleguy

Muscleguy — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:36:32 +0000

I wonder also if the people in the high risk category had lower immune systems because of their lifestyles and hence had a lower titre of antibodies or a lesser cell mediated immune response.

If this is so then it would make the idea of a vaccine that could protect the high risk groups even harder to do.

It might still mean it would be worth vaccinating the rest of the population (there is a stark difference in the risk group analysis between medium and high) in the same way that it is more effective to vaccinate children than their elderly grandparents if you want to reduce the incidence of influenza infection in the elderly. If the high risk group was entirely self contained then vaccinating everyone else makes no sense but we know this is not the case and since everyone else cannot tell by sight who is high risk this would seem sensible. Once we have a working vaccine that is.

By: peripheries

peripheries — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:24:35 +0000

The risk behaviour was measured using a list of 8 criteria, two of which were Same-sex gender partner (2.3% vs. 2.2% V:P) and needle-sharing (0.8% in each group) other criteria were:
- STI symptoms
- Sex with HIV positive partner
- No condom use during High-risk encounters
- Occupation entertainment
- Occupation CSW
- Multiple sex partners

The obvious reason explaining “why people who are most exposed to HIV are least likely to be protected” and why the vaccine “makes no difference to viral loads in those who do get infected” is simply that this vaccine does not work and it was all random and chance.