April 30, 2020

"Covid-19 lives in the shadow of the most vexing virus we’ve ever faced: H.I.V. After nearly 40 years of work..."

"... here is what we have to show for our vaccine efforts: a few Phase 3 clinical trials, one of which actually made the disease worse, and another with a success rate of just 30 percent. Researchers say they don’t expect a successful H.I.V. vaccine until 2030 or later, putting the timeline at around 50 years. That’s unlikely to be the case for Covid-19, because, as opposed to H.I.V., it doesn’t appear to mutate significantly and exists within a family of familiar respiratory viruses. Even still, any delay will be difficult to bear. But the history of H.I.V. offers a glimmer of hope for how life could continue even without a vaccine. Researchers developed a litany of antiviral drugs that lowered the death rate and improved health outcomes for people living with AIDS. Today’s drugs can lower the viral load in an H.I.V.-positive person so the virus can’t be transmitted through sex. Therapeutic drugs, rather than vaccines, might likewise change the fight against Covid-19.... Combine that with rigorous testing and contact tracing — where infected patients are identified and their recent contacts notified and quarantined — and the future starts looking a little brighter.... If all those things come together, life might return to normal long before a vaccine is ready to shoot into your arm."

From "How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take?" (NYT). The article examines many things that could be done to speed up the development and distribution of a vaccine (with the best possible result arriving in the middle to end of next year).

66 comments:

Richard Dolan said...

Back at the beginning of the HIV epidemic, when Fauci (yes, the same guy) was still doing rounds at NYC hospitals, he said that there would probably never be an effective vaccine against HIV because it was too much of a chameleon. Effective treatments would come in the form of drug combinations, treating each form that the chameleon took in a patient. It's the same story with cancers -- too diverse as a disease to admit of any cure by a vaccine.

Perhaps C-virus will be more like the flu, in that a somewhat effective vaccine can be created, but even with the flu, it is only effective in about half the cases.

Who knows. Not me.

Michael said...

Haha. Inside for as much as fifty years. OK if you say so. Baaaaaabaaaaaaabaaaaaaaaa

ga6 said...

ya know what? you can't do a anything about.

ga6 said...

edit note remove the a

Bay Area Guy said...

Well, according to the Johns-Hopkins Coronavirus website, there have been 3.2 Million cases and about 1 Million recoveries in the world (population 8 Billion). As for total deaths, 230,000 out of 8 Billion people. That's a global death rate of 29 deaths per 1 Million people.

This doesn't include all the uncounted folks (50 to 85 times actual cases) who got the virus, had mild or no symptoms, got immunity, and didn't even know it. Source: Santa Clara Study

The NYT is part of that cadre of clueless, fraidy-cat goofballs, who oversell the idea of a deadly new virus, and then oversell the idea of a life-saving vaccine to rescue them from the deadly new virus vexing their minds.

They somehow miss the cell-mediated immune system in between.

buwaya said...

By this August the US will have fewer people dying of this thing than Australia does.
And there will be other things to worry about.

The Vault Dweller said...

HIV is a relatively new virus. The common cold has been around forever. Something tells me if we add up all the deaths of a cold that turned into pneumonia compared to deaths from AIDS, the cold deaths would vastly outstrip the AIDS deaths, and we still don't have a vaccine for the common cold either, nor a cure.

Sebastian said...

For the vast majority of people, WuFlu is no big deal and they need no vaccine. For some people it is nasty, and they need to be super cautious for a long time. But even they need to assess risk properly: Althouse should be able to go back on the trail, and nursing homes should practice good hygiene but without guarantees.

Of course, HIV/AIDS is different, because infection itself is entirely avoidable.

daskol said...

And there will be other things to worry about.

Yes, like the next SARS causing viral pandemic. It can no longer be asserted that such a virus is a "black swan" event. We need to be resilient as societies and economies to these sorts of things, which are the plague of the over-optimized, globally connected world. It's not so much individual people who need vaccines for these diseases, but politics and economics that need some rethinking so that we can do things like suspend travel and proceed as much as possible with our lives and economic activity the next time this happens. Because there will be a next time, we just don't know when. Just as we can't await a vaccine to resume a path to normalcy, we can't rely on vaccines as a primary weapon against global pandemics.

Amadeus 48 said...

Yup. We are going to have to live with it.

I Have Misplaced My Pants said...

Just got the email from Eldest Pantslet’s college that in person classes are planned to resume on original schedule in August. She already has her marching band rehearsal schedule. Life goes on. Of course if the disease Comes Roaring Back, I suppose all bets are off, but in the meantime, adults are talking.

BUMBLE BEE said...

IEEEEEE... THE MOST VEXING SINCE THE LAST VEXING ONE. Only the strong survive, it's evolution kiddies.

Yancey Ward said...

Effective vaccines for AIDS was always a long shot- you are literally depending on the immune system that AIDS destroys. Every victim of AIDS had strong antibody responses to the virus that infected them within a couple of weeks, and the mutations that arose during the course of the disease, but the virus just grinds that immune system down to nothing, slowly but surely.

BUMBLE BEE said...

How many FLUs have to originate there before somebody wises up? Economic disaster currently outstrips ANY savings for many years to come. Do it to the children.

Bob Boyd said...

Covid 19 lives in the shadow of...HIV

"French Nobel prize winning scientist Luc Montagnier has sparked a fresh controversy by claiming that the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from a lab, and is the result of an attempt to manufacture a vaccine against the AIDS virus.
[Montagnier] won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Harald Zur Hausen for the discovery of HIV."

https://www.newsbytesapp.com/timeline/Science/60082/280809/nobel-winner-scientist-says-coronavirus-is-man-made

BUMBLE BEE said...

Bad parenting personified.

Oso Negro said...

I recommend a COVID+ dating site for the geriatric set. Like gays returning to the bath houses, we will not be able to slow the wheel chairs and walkers gimping to the senior centers of our land.

Inga said...

Before we get a reliable vaccine we may stumble upon some medication that actually works to mitigate the symptoms or actually stop it in its tracks. There have been articles mentioning a common heartburn medication, famotidine used in Pepcid, that may actually stop the virus from replicating...supposedly.

Famotidine, the active compound in the OTC heartburn drug Pepcid, is being tested to treat patients hospitalized with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), by Northwell Health in the New York City area, Science Magazine reported.1

The randomized, double-blind trial, which began on April 7, has enrolled 187 participants to date, but expects to expand to a total of 1174 individuals in critical status, including many on ventilators, due to the virus.


Michael K said...

[Montagnier] won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Harald Zur Hausen for the discovery of HIV."

After nearly 20 years of political hackery, especially by an NIH researcher who stole samples of the virus from them.

The story is in this book, a pretty good science detective story.

Lewis Wetzel said...

Aids appeared about four decades ago.
I literally know no person who has aids or who has died from aids. No friends, no relatives, no acquaintances.
The NY Times crowd is pretty parochial.

Michael K said...

Inga, as usual, ignores the cheap drug that actually works, Hydroxychloroquine.

Drago said...

How did that Wisconsin primary turn out in terms of spreading ChiCom/WHO Wuhan Lab Bat Flu?

The last report I saw said it was around 52 additional cases out of 400,000 voters and 0 deaths.

Inga said...

“Inga, as usual, ignores the cheap drug that actually works, Hydroxychloroquine.”

As usual, Michael K speaks before thinking. I’ve never said that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work. Yesterday I said “whatever works” when someone brought it up. Of course there should be continued research. Remdesivir is showing promising results also. Let’s not be so foolish to hitch our wagons to only one star.

bagoh20 said...

What do think Inga's reaction would be if it was Trump who mentioned Pepcid as a possible treatment? How many assholes on MSNBC would be making fun of him for it and fearing Pepcid overdoses nationwide. How many Democrat donors would try to kill their husbands with Pepcid?

Achilles said...

AIDS still kills a million people every year.

Somehow we aren't freaking out about it.

Levi Starks said...

So like the 4th of July?

Fernandinande said...

Outcry as Spanish beach sprayed with bleach

Bay Area Guy said...

"Inga, as usual, ignores the cheap drug that actually works, Hydroxychloroquine"

Comparing Doc Fauci's response to HCQ and the HIV drug is priceless. As to the first, he was non-plussed, bored, skeptical. The drug has been FDA approved since the 1950s.

As to the HIV drug, he got a boner and started gushing with the enthusiasm of a teenage girl.

The man is way past his sell date.

Ray - SoCal said...

What the article ignored, was some vaccines are actually in the human study phase.

In the US, I think there is one in Seattle, that was getting ethics since it was being tested on people:

I found this for status:
https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker

Plus there is the plasma treatments. That is basically a vaccine.

And Israel is doing some work that sounds exciting:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-made-oral-vaccine-for-coronavirus-on-track-but-testing-will-take-months/
It should start human trials in another 2 months.

Steven said...

we still don't have a vaccine for the common cold either

Because nobody is willing to buy one for the price it would cost.

"The common cold" isn't a virus, it's a whole host of viruses, many not even particularly similar to each other except in symptoms. It would be technically pretty easy to make a vaccine against a single one. And that one would be useless, because it'd drop your chance of getting a cold any given year by 5% at best. With so many viruses meaning mutations would regularly force development of new vaccines.

Going after "the common cold" would require a lot of startup effort followed by the same sort of annual effort and expense used to develop flu vaccines, for far less health benefit (lives saved, misery avoided, etc.). Nobody's willing to pay for it, so it doesn't get done.

Brown Hornet said...

Still no SARS vaccine after 17 years. Not sure why people are talking about a Son-of-SARS vaccine in 18 months.

n.n said...

New insights on the antiviral effects of chloroquine against coronavirus: what to expect for COVID-19?

The multiple molecular mechanisms by which chloroquine can achieve such results remain to be further explored. ... preliminary data indicate that chloroquine interferes with SARS-CoV-2 attempts to acidify the lysosomes and presumably inhibits cathepsins, which require a low pH for optimal cleavage of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein

Zn2+ Inhibits Coronavirus and Arterivirus RNA Polymerase Activity In Vitro and Zinc Ionophores Block the Replication of These Viruses in Cell Culture

A prophylactic treatment that disinfectants the virus that causes Covid-19.

Drago said...

Michael K: "Inga, as usual, ignores the cheap drug that actually works, Hydroxychloroquine"

There are also reports that ARM's Beloved And Heroic Peoples Republic Of China ChiComs were attempting to market remdesivir to other nations as far back as January....all with WHO assistance.

That is potentially a VERY VERY interesting development and I'm wondering if that is part of what Trump was asking the intel services to look into.

Of course, the "intelligence" services of the US are completely corrupted institutions that have missed every major event since the 1950's and whose personnel spend the majority of their time attempting to frame republican candidates for collusion, so I'm not confident they'll find much.

On the other hand they are very good at finding out the wrong Michael Cohen went to Prague, so they do have that going for them.

Drago said...

Lewis Wetzel: "I literally know no person who has aids or who has died from aids. No friends, no relatives, no acquaintances.
The NY Times crowd is pretty parochial."

My brother in law, in the 1990's, and many of his friends.

Drago said...

BUMBLE BEE: "How many FLUs have to originate there before somebody wises up? Economic disaster currently outstrips ANY savings for many years to come."

The dems, the media and the WHO/UN agencies are completely in the pocket of the ChiComs.

CNN has for months now been publishing articles verbatim that come from ChiCom owned media outlets and their own "journalists" have been praising the ChiComs non-stop for months.

Even more than ARM has at Althouse, and given the volume and tone of ARM's over the top adoration of the ChiComs, that's saying something.

Chris of Rights said...

The article examines many things that could be done to speed up the development and distribution of a vaccine (with the best possible result arriving in the middle to end of next year).

Bloomberg respectfully disagrees:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-29/trump-s-operation-warp-speed-aims-to-rush-coronavirus-vaccine

Bob Boyd said...

The last report I saw said it was around 52 additional cases out of 400,000 voters and 0 deaths.

How could we possibly know these are "additional cases"?
How could we possibly know where these people were exposed or when?
Are these even specific individuals or just a number somebody deduced is higher by 52 than it should be?

gilbar said...

hey? Remember the olden days? back when we were ALL going to quit having our own cars?
We were All going to rideshare, until ROBOTIC CARS happened; then we'd ALL use the robots

I wonder what happened to that dream?
Lyft, plans termination of approximately 982 employees, representing 17% of the Company’s employees

It's ALMOST AS IF, people don't like the idea of riding around with someone else !?!?

Jim Howard said...

Dr Jerome Kim is the world's leading expert on HIV treatment, and one of the top virus experts in the world.

In this excellent interview he explains why HIV is different from Covid-19 with respect to vaccines.

The whole interview is well worth watching, this link is to the HIV discussion.

TLDR: HIV attacks T-cells, which wrecks the whole human immune system. Coronavirus does not.

https://youtu.be/5cYWd0N8nO4?t=559

Jupiter said...

It is still far from clear that AIDS is caused by HIV, or even that "AIDS" is a single disease.

https://www.virusmyth.com/aids/whistleblowers.htm

Birkel said...

Can we call it a vaccine when it is as successful as the flu vaccine?
30% sounds about right.

MikeR said...

A little silly to be comparing a coronavirus with a retrovirus.

gerry said...

The NYT is no longer credible. This is just another attempt to politicize COVID-19, which is morally disgusting. The NYT is disgusting.

KellyM said...

Blogger Lewis Wetzel said...
"Aids appeared about four decades ago.
I literally know no person who has aids or who has died from aids. No friends, no relatives, no acquaintances.
The NY Times crowd is pretty parochial."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Dr. Fauci, et al, the same ones who predicted back in the day that the AIDS virus was going to mushroom to epic proportions within the heterosexual population? Outside of the two most at-risk groups (gay men, and intravenous drug users) that never really materialized. Forgive me for growing tired of their pearl-clutching.

Iman said...

Fook the NYT in their cake holes...

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

buwaya said...
By this August the US will have fewer people dying of this thing than Australia does.


A testable prediction.

mandrewa said...

We could run animal trials on hydroxychloroquine plus zinc testing whether or not it makes a difference if given early in the infection. Or in other words seeing if the cell culture results are replicated for whole animals.

For many people such trials would probably settle the matter.

That is if they came back negative, most people that currently believe in hydroxychloroquine would drop that belief. Now if it came back positive I'm not sure there would be a wholesale change in attitude but it would surely move the needle.

I just did a search for such a trial in NIH's list of clinical trials (which covers most of the world). I came up with nothing.

I just did a search on duckduckgo and since there are many pages of results I have not read all of them, but there are not any animal trials of hydroxychloroquine listed in the first two pages.

I found a WHO paper that mentions several prior animal studies on chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine. But, and here's the thing, I think we are talking about the same old thing, treatment after the animal is seriously ill. Even so there were some positive results even if it wasn't a magic bullet.

From that same WHO paper, "Both post-exposure prophylaxis and longer-term prophylactic use of hydroxychloroquine & chloroquine should also be considered."

Which suggests that there have been no animal trials using hydroxychloroquine for "post-exposure prophylaxis."

It's odd, I guess my mind works differently. This seems like an obvious thing to want to get data on. And it could be done relatively quickly.

mikee said...

What I have to do as a human to avoid HIV versus what I have to do to avoid COVID-19 are, at least to my way of thinking, significantly different.

I can avoid promiscuous sex with unsafe sexual practices pretty damn easily.
Breathing, not so much.

This seems an attempt to normalize HIV, which I am still not willing to do.
HIV is a highly avoidable virus, and people should avoid it.

Fritz said...

Commercially viable vaccines for coronavirus diseases in dogs and cattle already exist, which suggests to me that, despite fears to the contrary, a vaccine for WuFlu should be just a matter of applying the same technology to a related virus.

mandrewa said...

And I found this quote from Novartis Chief Executive Vas Narasimhan:

"Pre-clinical studies in animals as well as the first data from clinical studies show that hydroxychloroquine kills the coronavirus," Narasimhan told the newspaper. "We're working with Swiss hospitals on possible treatment protocols for the clinical use of the drug, but it's too early to say anything definitively."

Novartis is one the world's largest pharmaceutical companies.

The trouble is if they follow normal protocols and don't treat this like an emergency it will take years to get results even from animal trials.

effinayright said...

Brown Hornet said...
Still no SARS vaccine after 17 years. Not sure why people are talking about a Son-of-SARS vaccine in 18 months.
**************

SARS is yesterday's newspaper. Son-of-SARS is today's front page headline, that''s why.

bagoh20 said...

"I can avoid promiscuous sex with unsafe sexual practices pretty damn easily."

That's what they all say, and then tequila happens.

Sebastian said...

mikee: "What I have to do as a human to avoid HIV versus what I have to do to avoid COVID-19 are, at least to my way of thinking, significantly different."

Of course. But at the time I heard an eminent epidemiologist say that HIV was the most infectious disease known to man.

Anyway, we've been over the parallels between the fabricated HIV panic and the fabricated WuFlu panic in other threads, but the essential commonality is this effort to portray a very specific threat as universal plague.

In this case of HIV, it was done to promote the normalization of gay sex; in the case of WuFlu it was done in part to promote the tanking of the economy and the increase of government power--and of course, the serve the interests of the old at the expense of the young.

Howard said...

Well in one way the diseases HIV and covid-19 are very similar in that the deplorables don't give a shit about either primary victim group.

Drago said...

In another hammer blow to ARM's already shattered and pathetic reputation as Beijing's biggest propagandist at Althouse blog, we have this:

"British doctors warn some Chinese ventilators could kill if used in hospitals
Exclusive:"


"We believe that if used, significant patient harm, including death, is likely," British doctors said in a letter."

Ouch!

Don't worry. For every ChiCom dark cloud misstep ARM can find the silver lining.

narciso said...

yes he was indeed, the one, and he has a tangential connection to this matter, as the head of the nih, that funded research at Wuhan institute of virology,

cubanbob said...

Michael K said...
Inga, as usual, ignores the cheap drug that actually works, Hydroxychloroquine."

In her defense I did mention this to her last night in one of the threads and she replied whatever works, works.

I guy I know, a pulmonologist working with Covid 19 patients in the ICU contracted the virus. He took Hydroxychloroquine plus Zinc and AZT and shook it off without too much of a problem. Another guy I know, extended family is a head nurse in a Bronx hospital also contracted the virus but did not take the combo and was terribly sick for over two weeks. Still run down and recovering. Both guys in their late fifties. Anecdote and not data but still, enough people have taken Dr. Trump's combo cocktail and had favorable results. I'm a high risk individual, if I got the virus I don't care who recomended a medically plausible drug regimine. I would take it. Of course under medical supervision.

cubanbob said...

Howard said...
Well in one way the diseases HIV and covid-19 are very similar in that the deplorables don't give a shit about either primary victim group."

Thanks Howard for projecting your thoughts on others.

bagoh20 said...

Who is "the primary victim group" of Covid-19" ?

Overall, less Americans have died than usual, but very unusual is that there are many millions of Americans put out of work, bankrupted, or ruined? Many will also die from the response itself. Telling them they don't care about the "victims" when your preferred policies are what actually created most of the victims should suggest more shutting the fuck up.

cubanbob said...

Sebastian said...
mikee: "What I have to do as a human to avoid HIV versus what I have to do to avoid COVID-19 are, at least to my way of thinking, significantly different."

Of course. But at the time I heard an eminent epidemiologist say that HIV was the most infectious disease known to man.

Anyway, we've been over the parallels between the fabricated HIV panic and the fabricated WuFlu panic in other threads, but the essential commonality is this effort to portray a very specific threat as universal plague."

Forty years on we forget the panic at the time. In the beginning it was recognized that the victims were mostly Gays but besides anal sex and IV drug users it was feared that one could contract the virus from sweat, tears, saliva and contact with an infected person such as shaking hands or breathing the same air. It was also thought that the virus would mutate and become even more infectious and spread through the general population. A virus that attacks the immune system, hides in reservoirs in the body is a potential plague. Fortunately it hasn't mutated to become as infections as the flu or Covid 19 but imagine if it did. Fortunately there are drug cocktails that must be taken religiously to keep the virus at bay but they have to be taken for life. I doubt there will ever be a vaccine for HIV. As for Covid 19, like the flu eventually we will have a vaccine and like the flu every year it will be a t hit or miss vaccine proposition so lets hope we have effective antivirals for the inevitable outbreaks.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

If it's on craptastic MSDNC - you can take it to the bank! Hillary does.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Americans need to get off their asses and build stuff. The F-ing government needs to get out of the way.

Comey-Brennan-Hillary_Obama_Biden-Strozk-etc deep state actors want you enslaved.

Jeff said...

The scare-mongering is getting ridiculous.

Unlike the flu, the Wuhan virus mutates slowly enough that a vaccine is both possible and probable. Someone pointed out earlier that we still don't have a vaccine against SARS. That's true, but the reason is that once SARS was defeated, work on vaccines was suspended.

The analogies to HIV are also off base. HIV attacks and subverts the immune system itself, Wuhan does not. And AIDS is far more lethal than the corona virus. Before there were decent treatments, HIV was usually a death sentence if you caught it. Antibody testing tells us that corona virus kills less than 1 percent of those infected, possibly as low as 0.15 percent.

There has also been a lot of talk about South Koreans who recovered from the virus and then tested positive for it weeks or even months later. But according to Korean medical researchers, this happens because the PCR RNA test looks for fragments of viral RNA, and does not discriminate between fragments from live vs dead virus. The researchers checked to see if the virus was replicating in those recovered patients and found that it was not. They are not infected and they cannot infect others.

So far, there is zero evidence that people who developed antibodies while recovering from Covid are not protected against reinfection. There are no documented cases of that happening, even though antibody testing tells us that more than a hundred million corona virus survivors. If this was actually a problem, it would be painfully obvious by now.

One other note: Governor Cuomo reported yesterday that antibody testing showed that the infection rate among fire fighters, EMTs and police was actually considerably lower than it was among random NYC residents. That was unexpected.

Yancey Ward said...

Great comment, Jeff.

Maillard Reactionary said...

I've never been vexed by HIV. Not that I'm complaining, of course.

Oddly, most people just don't seem to get HIV. What could explain that?

LA_Bob said...

Ah, yes, AIDS. In the early years, we were "all at risk", because the gay men dropping like flies thought they might win a Manhattan-project research effort and live if they could convince everyone else they, too, would die from AIDS. Forty years later, AIDS, as a practical matter, essentially remains a male homosexual disease.

A great book on the subject, published in 1993, was Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus by Robert Root-Bernstein. The book explored the contradictions of AIDS and the issues around HIV as the "necessary and sufficient" cause. Root-Bernstein himself did not take a strong position, leaving that to gadfly skeptics like the virologist Peter Duesberg, who was vilified for his critique of the HIV hypothesis.

The book explored, among other things, the complexities of autoimmunity so common in AIDS victims.

In the late 1990's, Root-Bernstein was satisfied the provisionally successful treatments for AIDS proved HIV was "central to AIDS", although it is rarely sufficient alone to cause the disease.

Root-Bernstein still writes occasional papers on autoimmunity and AIDS. He thinks a vaccine is very unlikely ever, because HIV, a retrovirus, inserts its DNA into our genome. Thus, an antibody to HIV becomes an antibody to ourselves, and that's a problem.