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Hilary's Desk

If you want an HIV vaccine...

Hilary Butler - Thursday, September 30, 2010

....then you have to use all the other vaccines to the maxWhere have we heard that before? In a previous blog was a URL showing that influenza manufacturers told governments that if they wanted pandemic influenza vaccines, then they better work harder than hard, at making sure everyone possible was needled with ordinary influenza vaccines.  Governments and Ministries all around the world are doing their damnedest to do just that.  USA has just about succeeded, and other countries are falling over themselves to catch up.  The problem being that the public won't swallow their bait.  In a new twist to this blackmail trail, we are now being told by Mitchell Warren, executive director of the Aids Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, that if governments want an HIV vaccine in the future, then "political will" had better ensure that everyone gets jabbed with all the other vaccines on offer beforehand. Says Warren:

"It is important to work with the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation to build the political will and the market for the vaccines that these companies currently producethat way, once a vaccine becomes available there is an incentive to produce it for a guaranteed, wide market."

Not quite so brazenly this time, but this is the same message as in 2005... in the face of another astonishing admission:

There are still so many unknowns about the human immune system and how it works,....

And where did we see THAT message before? Ten years ago, when, this press release hit the internet:



The assumption that successful vaccines work by simply producing antibodies is almost certainly wrong, Neal Nathanson, director of the US Office of AIDS Research, warns. "Hepatitis B vaccine is a good example. It's amazingly effective but no one knows how it works. And what's really interesting is it does work, even though HBV is a persistent infection-like HIV."

The vaccine probably stimulates some protective effect relying on killer T cells. But no one knows how it does it or what exactly the process is-even though the vaccine has been widely used for nearly ten years. It's a similar story for other highly successful vaccines including polio, measles and smallpox, he says. Ruth Ruprecht, a vaccine researcher and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, points out it's hard to get funding to research vaccines that already exist. "I always run into prejudice," she told New Scientist. "They say: 'It's old. What good is it?'"

Even if researchers can plug these huge gaps in their basic understanding, they may face another obstacle in their pursuit of an AIDS vaccine. Inducing antibodies against HIV might, in the initial stages of infection, do more harm than good, claims Ron Montelaro of the University of Pittsburgh.

His studies of a HIV-related virus that infects horses, known as the equine infectious anaemia virus, appears to confirm that the antibodies which initially respond to an infection can help spread the viruses around the body. Some vaccines designed to protect horses from infection make them die more quickly than unvaccinated horses, he found.

This process, whereby antibody production helps rather than hinders infectious agents, has been dubbed "enhancement". Montelaro suggests that these early enhancing antibodies actually help pull virus particles into the cells they are trying to infect. "It's an issue people haven't wanted to think about. But we might have to," he says. Jay Levy of the University of California at San Francisco, agrees: "Efforts to avoid these harmful consequences of HIV immunisation must be given a high priority."

If you're really concentrating, there is some scarey truths being admitted to.  That last paragraph described exactly how Merck's HIV vaccine failed.

You mean.... they didn't have the foggiest as to what they were doing with any of those vaccines?  Whoa there.

But.... Note the sandwich wording?  the huge emphasis on the words "highly successful" constantly strung together throughout all the bad news.  This news release never made it into normal papers at the time.  Eurekalerts were and are primarily read by investors, and inconvenient truths like this, aren't shown to "ordinary" people who might wonder at the subtexts.

The funny thing is that the Guardian 2010 press release an even more arrogant mix of the HIV Eurekalert above, as well as a more wide-reaching "threat" to governments. 

And they still don't have the foggiest now, ...about the immune system.  Or the way the trial vaccines work. Yup, that's right:

The challenge is that we don't know how much further we need to go before we find a viable candidate....What we need is to better understand the steps along the way....large clinical trials are the best way to learn about the vaccine so we need to generate more ideas to improve the effectiveness of these trials and we definitely need to generate more of these trials...there is now a healthy dialogue on how to proceed next....

Define "healthy dialogue" - another amorphous catch-all phrase...

Note in the face of ignorance, more sandwich words:

It is important to know that prevention trials are essentially state-of-the-art prevention packages, with one arm of the trial receiving the comprehensive prevention package as well as the vaccine candidate, and another receiving the comprehensive prevention package and a placebo.

Everything is "comprehensive" and "state-of-the-art" with the word comprehensive in lieu of "highly successful".. and to make it sound better.  We are told that there has been "unprecedented developments" in the last year.  We are told that:

Tremendous progress. Over the past year, scientists have identified neutralising antibodies against HIV

Huh?  What is the difference between THESE antibodies, and the ones which were discovered very quickly after the HIV virus was announced, and the ones discovered a long time ago, in people who carry HIV but don't get disease?  Why are these antibodies new or different from the others?

and then....:  If we do come up with a vaccine, collaboration with large companies will be crucial.

This is just about the only bit of truth, because the fact is, a vaccine against HIV is a very BIG "IF"!  Ask Merck.

The Guardian press release is a smoother mixture of the 2000 HIV Eurekalert above, and the same threat to governments which the influenza vaccine manufacturers made in 2005. 

Same strategist is behind this venture, as is behind pandemic vaccines. 

This Guardian press release, like the Eurekalert HIV one, says:

We're admitting we're ignorant about both the immune system, or how our vaccines work, so that you can see why we need so much money, even though we're really very very clever. After all, a 31% effectiveness is "proof of concept"....  it's a start.  A vaccine is "just" around the corner.  (Like we said after the HIV virus was discovered).  That corner might be a few decades down the road though...

But this time you need to give us MORE than one shot of money - it has to be LOTS of money, and all the time.  And as well as that, you need to use all the other vaccines to the max.

We can assure you, that we know enough to assure you,  ...... that You will never see an article in our medical journals showing that vaccines we inject into you will damage this immune system which we know nothing much about, so you can always trust us.  (Even if we dont' know what we're doing.)

So c'mon G8 countries, everyone give us our regular AIDS dosh.

AND G8 governments, during the decades it takes for us to possibly fail - yet again - like the last Merck trials which gave more people HIV than those who had the placebo... please line up everyone in your country, fill them up with every other vaccine under the sun, because you can't expect manufacturers to provide a state of the art comprehensive HIV vaccine, if they can't make a profit out of every man, woman and child in the world with  existing vaccines, AS WELL AS the HIV one as well.

Is there one Government in the world concerned about this shot-gun marriage?  Not that I can see.

After all, what is there to worry our silly heads about?




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