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New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

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Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#81
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking teen pregnancy as an example: we have the tools to avoid it. We have condoms, we have birth control, we have the morning after pill, we have abortion. We have all the tools -- are more tools really going to help? The fact that teen pregnancy is still an issue is not because we lack the tools to solve it. HIV prevention is similar. We already have the tools. We have condoms. We have PrEP. Sure, a vaccine would…

It's still killing people like crazy (and spreading) in undeveloped nations. The new drugs are un-cheap. Also, I believe that we just DOGEd our only vehicle for distributing these to underdeveloped nations.

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Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#82
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For rich people (meaning the ~3 billion people that have some sort of access to medical infrastructure), it is a solved problem, but there are quite many people without any access to it. Even for those "solved problem" people, taking a pill every day to be protected is inconvenient. They might not take it every day, etc. Also, even if it were a solved problem, the methodologies developed here can probably help with o…

Again, inaccurate. You can get a PrEP shot twice a year now. Access is a valid point. Perhaps the money being used to fund a superfluous vaccine should be used to fund access to PrEP in the Third World.

> Perhaps the money being used to fund a superfluous vaccine should be used to fund access to PrEP in the Third World

An astounding statement. Is it not possible that a vaccine giving decades of protection would give better health outcomes than doing PrEP every 6 months?

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#83
post #3

While HIV vaccine research is an exciting field, it's worth pointing out that halting HIV transmission is, practically speaking, a solved problem with oral and injectable reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The ongoing loss of life and health due to HIV could be stopped if we cared enough to invest resources in wide-scale PrEP availability and public health education. Waiting for an HIV vaccine is the domain equivalent…

You could say the same about teen pregnancy being a practically solved problem, except there is still the problem of teen pregnancy. Or even something more mundane as driving consistently safely all the time to solve the problem of accidents. If everyone was disciplined all the time in regard to everything, many problems in the world would simply not exist. But we live in reality where for whatever reason, people don…

I thought the current panic was that young people (not necessarily teens) weren't having enough kids?

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#85
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Besides that, PrEP has enabled the return of non-HIV STIs in major cities like Berlin where a lot of the community has returned to raw-dogging since the AIDS-Scare has become a historical artifact.

Is that a huge problem? Doesn’t almost everything else have a prophylactic and is curable? Hep-C might be the only other one I believe and I’m unaware if it’s treatable or not.

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#86
post #3

While HIV vaccine research is an exciting field, it's worth pointing out that halting HIV transmission is, practically speaking, a solved problem with oral and injectable reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The ongoing loss of life and health due to HIV could be stopped if we cared enough to invest resources in wide-scale PrEP availability and public health education. Waiting for an HIV vaccine is the domain equivalent…

You could say the same about teen pregnancy being a practically solved problem, except there is still the problem of teen pregnancy. Or even something more mundane as driving consistently safely all the time to solve the problem of accidents. If everyone was disciplined all the time in regard to everything, many problems in the world would simply not exist. But we live in reality where for whatever reason, people don…

Right, but we know that HIV/AIDS essentially is a solved problem in rich countries, that the mentioned interventions are readily available in rich countries, and the only reason HIV transmission is high in poor countries is because, well, they're poor. We (humanity as a whole) have plenty of money, we could fund these things, we simply choose not to.

I would caution against making an allusion to self control. It would be very cruel to act as if people who get a disease through no fault of their own could have avoided it, and most people who contract HIV could not. You may not have intended to make that allusion, but you did.

> So I would say that it's very evidently not a practically solved problem, because if it were we wouldn't be looking to solve it still.

This is obviously not what is meant by "practically solved problem". Everybody knows it is not actually solved.

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it exists, but how available is it really? If I recall correctly, the injections are also not very pleasant. "Gilead sells LEN at very high prices (over $28,000 per person per year in the US), severely restricts its supply to certain countries, and refuses to sell it directly to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières" Source: https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/campaigns/acces...

The shots are expensive, but the pills are free in the USA. They do have adverse kidney issues over prolonged use (more for some people than others).

And clearly only the people in the USA matter.

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#88

The most interesting point of the article for me is that this vaccine appears to be a series of shots which act as a curriculum for the immune system. Each one slightly different and targeting a different stage of B-cell development. I've never thought of vaccine series working like that, so it was a new and impressive idea.

This is the way a lot of modern cancer vaccines are being developed. The idea is to create custom vaccines in the future targeting the patients specific cancer. So they are therapeutic vaccines. Obviously some cancers cannot be reach by a vaccine or are so aggressive that they overwhelm the patient before they can help.

I'm not aware of cancer vaccines that use this sort of b-cell priming, though I've heard lots about mRNA vaccines, as well as neo-epitope based cancer therapeutic vaccines. Are you analogizing the neoepitope approaches to the B cell progression here? That is somewhat similar, but the chain of new vaccines does seem quite different and novel to me.

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#89
post #12
post #3

While HIV vaccine research is an exciting field, it's worth pointing out that halting HIV transmission is, practically speaking, a solved problem with oral and injectable reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The ongoing loss of life and health due to HIV could be stopped if we cared enough to invest resources in wide-scale PrEP availability and public health education. Waiting for an HIV vaccine is the domain equivalent…

Cost and compliance are still 2 major factors that have not been solved. We also have education and stigma. While within the LGBT community it is far more common to be open about status and taking prep and doxy (far from perfect though), it still feels like outside of that the conversations are not happening as much as they should. Throw in doctors that are not being proactive about the conversation. Right now it see…

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Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#90
post #3

While HIV vaccine research is an exciting field, it's worth pointing out that halting HIV transmission is, practically speaking, a solved problem with oral and injectable reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The ongoing loss of life and health due to HIV could be stopped if we cared enough to invest resources in wide-scale PrEP availability and public health education. Waiting for an HIV vaccine is the domain equivalent…

PrEP is difficult on the body over time and though it can be used if you are high risk you are meant to avoid certain medications while using it and have to do follow ups with your doctor to check organ functions.
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