Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

Does anyone know if this will combat the latent virus?

The hard part about conversations like this are that you could have written the definitive book on this stuff, or you could be just another dummy on the internet like me. So I have to take a statement like that and do my best to evaluate it myself, since I have no idea how to value your expertise. If you're an expert of some sort, I apologize in advance.

We know for a fact that vaccines have long term effects. They wouldn't be useful otherwise. It would be nice if they could only have positive long term effects, but why would there be any guarantee of that?

Symptoms could start immediately but be undetectable until they progress far enough (think a tiny little tumor for just one example). Again, not claiming this is happening, just saying that it seems nutty to assume it can't happen.

When I read "we understand how vaccines work pretty well", I automatically translate it to "we understand pretty well what happens when we inject a substance into a human body", and then I think "really?". We have some useful models, sure, but "understanding pretty well" seems a vast overstatement of the situation, especially when its laypeople chatting on the internet.

The abstract concept of a vaccine is pretty simple. Anybody can regurgitate the picture book version of it. Any specific instantiation of one is remarkably complex, all the way from manufacturing, to transport, to administration, and then interacting with the legacy ball of spaghetti that is the human body and it's various systems.

The fact that we humans decided to name some substance the same thing that we named some other substances that we created in the past doesn't necessarily tell you how that substance is going to interact with the body. It can provide you with hypotheses, but hypotheses need to be tested.

There are about 5 different false assertions in here with nothing to back them up.

The Israelis have found that a 4th shot isn't particularly useful in immocompetent healthy younger adults under 65. We're unlikely to have a 4th shot. This makes sense because in between the first dose(s) and the booster shot the immune system had time for the response to mature via hypermutation/maturation.

There's nothing wrong with the mRNA vaccines either since they're better for this virus than any other vaccine for this virus. The old school inactivate virus vaccines are worse than mRNA vaccines (although cheaper and easier to mass produce).

People compare mRNA vaccines to the polio vaccine but that is apples and oranges, since coronavirus is a virus that doesn't typically have a viremic phase (outside of severe multi-organ COVID). An appropriate comparison would be between coronavirus vaccines and flu vaccines. Comparing a coronavirus vaccine to a polio vaccine is just ignorant.

The mRNA vaccines are also wildly successful by the measure which matters most, which is protection against severe disease and death. They were never promised as being perfect against contracting the disease and transmission. You can lookup very public headline statements from Fauci in late 2020 before the vaccine trials were done setting expectations around a 50% vaccine efficacy against contracting disease.

We're also unlikely to be chasing after reformulating the vaccine for specific variants since by the time it could be updated and a hundred million doses were produced and shipped and we tried to get them into people's arms the variant wave would be over in that region. Just producing and moving the doses is a logistics problem that will take months. And the boosted response to the ancestral virus is still very strong against Omicron, and there's no evidence of any waning of efficacy against severe disease or hospitalization and no evidence of escape from T-cells (and the pattern of mutations in Omicron is random with respect to T-cell epitopes and shows no clustering).

The newspapers never should have sold vaccines as a way to stop the virus in its tracks. That isn't a problem with the science or the technology though. That is just that human emotions got out of control wishing for a magic shot that would make it all stop.

People often complain about the trials being cut short, but in fact we had enough data to determine the efficacy and safety outcomes. What we cut short was durability. Turns out the neutralizing antibodies and efficacy against infection/disease wane over 6-12 months (as it does with natural infection as well). That's the reason why the original 90% VE against infection numbers turned out to be wrong, we cut the studies short to start getting it into arms. The 90% VE against hospitalization/death have been maintained though.