Disease X by Kate Kelland;

Author:Kate Kelland;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

NOTES

28 https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/d0b61f6e1d1b40d1bb92ff9d9b60793d/no/pdfs/nou202220220005000dddpdfs.pdf

29 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56361599

30 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54182368

31 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/48-hours-in-september-when-ministers-and-scientists-split-over-covid-lockdown-vg5xbpsfx

6: PREPARE

to Fail

On 3rd February 2020, just as the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 began its rapid, long and lethal global march, the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – the scientific research institution led by the now world-famous Dr Anthony Fauci – issued a depressing but relatively little-noticed announcement.32 An expensive and long-running clinical trial involving more than 5,400 volunteers in South Africa to test the potential of a candidate vaccine against HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, had proved useless. It was time to call a halt to the $104 million study, the NIAID statement said. The trial, code-named HVTN 702 or Uhambo, had gotten peoples’ hopes up. It had been built on some already promising evidence from another curiously-named trial – RV144 – that had been conducted among thousands of people in Thailand between 2003 and 2009 and had been the only trial thus far to appear to show that an HIV vaccine could at least create a partially protective immune response.

The vaccine being tested in the Uhambo trial was based on a live bird virus called canarypox – a virus that scientists have discovered can infect human cells without causing any disease. That ability made it a promising so-called vector virus for a vaccine – one that carries material into human cells that then induces them to make several key proteins of the HIV virus. The hope was that those proteins would in turn stimulate the immune system to recognise and defend the body against any future HIV infection. That hope faded fast, however. Four years in to the trial, the study’s independent monitoring board unsealed some of the data collected from the 14 sites participating and found that the experimental shot was making no difference. The trial had been due to run for six years, until July 2022, but by early 2020, the board concluded that continuing it would be futile. “There’s absolutely no evidence of efficacy” was the blunt assessment made by Glenda Gray, an AIDS doctor, scientist and activist who co-led the study and is also president of the South African Medical Research Council. The number of people newly infected with HIV in the trial’s placebo control group was almost the same as the number in the group that had been given the experimental canarypox-vectored vaccine. The candidate vaccine had failed. And for AIDS vaccine researchers across the world, it was back to the drawing board. Again.

Again – because unfortunately the halting of the Uhambo trial was just the latest in a sorrowful string of failures that has characterised the search for a vaccine to prevent HIV. More than a decade earlier, in 2008, two separate trials of an experimental AIDS vaccine designed by the American pharmaceutical company Merck & Co and called MRK-Ad5 were also stopped after a mid-stage data analysis showed very worrying results. Merck is one of the most successful vaccine developers in the world and is behind eight of the 14 now routine vaccines currently recommended for children in the United States.

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