Medical advances in AIDS include antiretroviral medications (ART) to suppress the virus and keep the disease under control; and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) drugs to prevent HIV transmission if taken correctly by uninfected people who see themselves at risk. Today almost 29 million of the world’s 38 million HIV-infected people have access to life-saving ART drugs, according to UNAIDS.
And a vaccine against HIV remains frustratingly out of reach. That’s in contrast to the under one year it took to develop vaccines against COVID-19 that prevent severe disease, hospitalization and death in most cases.
So, if scientists can do it so quickly for COVID-19, why can’t they come up with a vaccine to prevent HIV?
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A big part of the reason, says [AVAC executive director Mitchell] Warren, is the rate at which the AIDS virus mutates. “The world has tracked the variants of COVID,” he says. Those variants include Alpha, Beta, Delta, Omicron and subvariants. But HIV is much more variable. “There are more variants of HIV in one person’s body within days after infection than all the variants of COVID.” That means that even as a vaccine is being developed to attack HIV, the virus may be mutating out of its reach.
