HIV Vaccines Successful?

Headway is being made on an HIV vaccine, a medical trial carried out in Thailand supposedly indicates. According to a BBC report, 16,000 heterosexuals between the ages of 18-30 were inoculated with a combination of vaccines. Over a 3-year period, out of 8,000 people who were inoculated, 51 contracted the HIV virus. Out of the other 8,000 who were given a placebo, 74 got HIV. The sponsors of this trial, as well as the Thai government, determined that these numbers correlated to a 31.2% protection rate for the vaccine. Others disagree, however, stating that when you analyze the numbers in a variety of different ways, the statistical significance is largely diminished.

The study seems like a strange one, whatever the actual significance. Telling a group of 16,000 people that they are being vaccinated for HIV and then letting them run amuck seems like a subliminal endorsement of unsafe sex, the giving of a false sense of security in an insecure sexual world. Maybe this was the point, however grim the method -- to encourage the maximum occurrence of incidents to contract HIV within the test study. The study’s numbers would certainly be more telling if this was the case, but one has to wonder the impact, especially outside the trial group, of such an experiment.

Now matter how you look at it -- whether the eventual implication of this test ends up being monumental or irrelevant -- Thailand’s HIV-positive population has now increased by at least 125, and almost certainly more, depending on how far the test subjects spread the virus. The protection against HIV and AIDS would ultimately be better served through rigorous safe-sex education. If the study were reproduced in a manner where all 16,000 people had sex only using condoms, I’d guess that the overall HIV contraction rate would have been much lower than that in the actual study.