Australian COVID vaccine cancelled after Phase I trials produced false positive HIV test results!

[thewayne]

Not exactly something you want to see in a vaccine!

From the article:
"The (vaccine's) molecular clamp is made from a HIV protein, which on its own is harmless. The molecular clamp stabilizes the coronavirus spike protein and presents it to the body in a way that promotes a good immune response. This is why the clamp technology is so vital," Taylor said.

He added that the clamp model vaccine had shown "good safety and immune response" against the coronavirus in early clinical trials, and the possibility for generating an HIV positive result had been thought to be low.

Yeah. Apparently not as low as they'd thought!

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/australia/australia-vaccine-hiv-intl-hnk/index.html

Comments

[armiphlage]

TB vaccines causes false positives for tests that check if you have active TB infections. Some countries still give them, on the grounds that preventing many people from a disease is worth not being able to reliably detect the presence of a disease, until more severe symptoms arise.

If no other COVID vaccine was available, it might be worth giving this one to those at high risk of dying of COVID in the short term, with the tradeoff that they wouldn't be able to swiftly detect future HIV infections. And if you currently are HIV+, it'd be a no-brainer.

[thewayne]

Excellent points.  I have no idea how many people are living with HIV/AIDS these days, I know it's not a small number, but would it be enough to make finishing development and distributing a vaccine profitable?  BUT, we have a proverbial plethora of vaccines in development, so there's not a problem with some failing - which some have.  As I said in another post, I was reading more about this particular vaccine's problem, and they estimated it would take a year to edit out this bug, and I don't know if that would require restarting trials at that point.

I knew about the TB vaccine issue.  I fired a doc because she used a test that we told her would return a false positive.  We thought I might have mono, she wanted to run a basic antibody test.  We told her I get antibodies from 10,000 people every week.  Guess what: the test showed that I had mono in the past.  You have to use PCR tests on me.