How was it possible to develop effective COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year when after decades of trying there remains no way to prevent cancer or HIV/AIDS and many other deadly diseases?
Effective COVID-19 vaccines were developed in under a year. But a half-century after the country declared war on cancer, and 40 years after the first reported case of HIV/AIDS, there remains no way to prevent either disease, or many more.
The human immune system can easily eliminate COVID-19, while none of the 38 million people infected with HIV over four decades has ever completely gotten rid of that virus on their own, said Barouch, who has been working on an HIV vaccine for more than 16 years. SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, is a pretty standard virus made of a single strand of genetic code and dotted on the outside with the spike protein that gives the coronavirus family of viruses its distinctive crowned profile.
So, unlike the spike protein on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, HIV lacks an obvious target for a vaccine, he said. And the targets it does have change rapidly and are hidden from the immune system.the SARS-CoV-2 virus the way it has eliminated smallpox and has contained measles, Shapiro said.Once someone is infected with or vaccinated against measles or smallpox, they're protected for life.
To deliver his HIV vaccine, Barouch spent years engineering a cold virus to carry a vaccine payload into cells without making people sick. He used the same modified adenovirus 26 to deliver his COVID-19 vaccine.
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