Today is HIV Vaccine Awareness Day. As those around me have probably picked up on, making an HIV vaccine has become one of my causes. In the quickest vaccine development ever, we made a COVID vaccine in a number of months, but it’s been almost 40 years since AIDS came to light, you say… Why haven’t we developed an effective HIV vaccine when COVID’s was made so quickly?
For one, COVID has significantly less mutations. Remember how all those COVID variants (delta, omicron) caused health professionals fits? Well, HIV has *thousands* more variants than COVID, so all that variation makes an HIV vaccine much harder to develop. Like a juking superstar running back in football, HIV often just out-mutates a trial vaccine.
Is a vaccine still needed when we have pharmacologic therapies that work? Yes. Think of these factors:
- 650,000 people died of AIDS globally in 2021 – one every minute – despite all our progress.
- Each day, 4,000 people become infected with HIV.
- Since 2015, HIV infection rates have increased (!) in 38 countries.
- Worldwide, only half (52%) of infected children, humanity’s most precious resource, have access to life-saving treatments.
- Society’s most needy and marginalized groups have always been the hardest hit.
Despite effective treatments and government initiatives, HIV remains a public and global health issue.
Without further containment and wisely targeted funding, HIV could make a regional or global resurgence. It’s much smarter and cheaper to nip it in the bud ASAP by the best tool we have – an effective vaccine. But we must develop a vaccine first, and that takes work.
Today is a day to learn about that effort. To do something, visit www.helpendhiv.org to consider joining a vaccine study. Participants are usually paid for their time, and researchers need healthy individuals of all stripes the most.