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"New hope for Aids vaccine"-- VaxGen

Less searchable M0rd4nt

22:26 / 08.07.02

From BBC News:- A US biotechnology company has been giving details of a vaccine against Aids, which it hopes could be available by 2005, to delegates attending the International Aids Conference in Barcelona.

Read the full article for more.

09:31 / 09.07.02

The odd thing about this news story was that I first read it off yahoo.com, and the main body of the article talked mainly about how distribution and manufacturing centres need to be set up now in Africa, so that they'll be ready to distribute it to the most afflicted areas as soon as it's ready.

I haven't read that in any other news source so far. It's quite a suprise headline too.

10:33 / 09.07.02

From the coverage I've seen of this story the version of the vaccine that is supposedly 5 years away works best on strains of the AIDS virus that are most often found in the rich/developed world -

No surprise that Bio-tech companies are focusing on finding a cure for those parts of the world that can best afford it rather than those most effected by it, but it is worth noting all the same.

11:38 / 09.07.02

Yes, and given all the bio-tech hot air that we've had in he past, it isn't worth holding your breath is it?

But, sleaze, if an Aids vaccine WAS developed, should the bio-tech company be forced to slash its prices so that it was available in the 3rd world?

12:42 / 09.07.02

dan: Yes, yes, yes! (Although I realize you weren't asking me...)

The biotech company should definitely have to make the vaccine affordable to everyone. Hell, I believe that they should have to distribute it for free, and Capitalism be damned.

The likelihood of that happening is, of course, pretty slim, as the Economy cares not for the suffering of human beings...

14:03 / 09.07.02

Surely no one could allow a company to charge so much for an AIDS vaccine that those who need it most couldn't afford it. At the same time you have to recognise the role of private enterprise in making it happen and provide encouragement for more of the same.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

16:10 / 09.07.02

Surely no one could allow a company to charge so much for an AIDS vaccine that those who need it most couldn't afford it.

*Hollow laughter*

Less searchable M0rd4nt

18:14 / 09.07.02

A little more detail here: A major five-year programme to develop the "holy grail" of HIV vaccine research has been launched...

18:15 / 09.07.02

Hmmm, just been reading up about the Trips agreement. Some depressing reading. How can free market ideas be applied to life and death scenarios? It is completely unjustifiable. How could anyone expect regions such as Brazil not to pass laws which infringe such unreasonable patents in order to help people?

What does everyone think of the argument that without strict patent controls less research would be carried out and fewer cures discovered. Does the Trips protocol have any redeeming features?

20:40 / 09.07.02

The biotech company should definitely have to make the vaccine affordable to everyone. Hell, I believe that they should have to distribute it for free, and Capitalism be damned.

What if the company goes out of business during this process?

22:45 / 09.07.02

Actually selling a potential AIDS vaccine to Africa makes ecconomic sense - Think of the shear size of the market there to buy you product - a market that will be far smaller unless exploited sooner rather than later.

03:32 / 10.07.02

I would say that this is one of the areas in which the role of government is to do what no one else has any reason to do

fund the fucking reasearch from the tax base.

but I'm drunk off my ass.

07:09 / 10.07.02

I would say that this is one of the areas in which the role of government is to do what no one else has any reason to do
fund the fucking reasearch from the tax base.

Yeah, but surely the problem is that no governmental agency exists that could fund this research at a global level. Only multinational companies have the money, the power and the incentive to do that. So either steps are going to have to be made towards a global, democratic political and legislative body with a social remit or that incentive is going to have to remain. For democratic and social read massive redistribution of wealth.

Is that at all likely? Is the European Social Fund an example that could be taken to a global level?

12:39 / 10.07.02

I dunno. How much is being spent on AIDS research now, and how does that compare to the cost of say, an aircraft carrier? How much research effort is being duplicated, being spread among different organizations, which all have a financial stake in not sharing the full results of their research?

13:55 / 10.07.02

I'm not sure about the cost of the potential drug, but these things tend to be very expensive. Even if you reject capitalism, there is still a resource cost. Is anything like a cost benefit analysis appropriate in these situations?

Mind you, MJ-12's point about military spending does throw an interesting light on it all...

15:45 / 10.07.02

In the UK the government would (effectively) set the price. Why? Because if it does work it's got to be the most deeply required innoculation programme in the history of mankind. I cannot see any government not being required by the electorate to innoculate the entire population. By the time you get national(ised) innoculation programmes it's a case of the government negotiating a price with the manufacturers.

If this can be done on a national level, why not an international one? So, why not pay the companies for their hard work, thereby encouraging the future bio-developers, but have the WHO do so. They did it with small pox innoculations (admittedly with an open market rather than a monopolistic supplier) and the eradication of the disease is still rightly regarded as one of the greatest achievements of mankind.

As for the company getting rich - assuming that the WHO organises a world wide innoculation programme, even on a profit of 1p per shot (and let's assume we have to keep the programme up for a good 50 years to erradicate the disease - a relatively conservative assumption), the company is still going to be so incredibly rich that future developers are going to have plenty of incentive to burn the midnight oil.

17:40 / 04.03.04

Or, they could just use this little guy.

HIV patients who are also infected by a second, mysterious virus are less likely to develop AIDS and die of the disease, suggests a new study.

Up to six years after their initial HIV-infection, men whose blood contained the second virus - known simply as GB virus C (GBV-C) - were nearly three times less likely to die than HIV-positive men who did not have the secondary infection.

I love weird interactions like this.

19:36 / 02.12.04

New HIV Vaccine