[H8crilA]

It may even be 100 years for all we know. It's not a problem of legislation. It's a problem of not knowing how to do this. This really has to be emphasised: it will most likely be much harder to achieve anything here. The covid vaccine was exceptional not only in the overall time-to-market but also in that it just worked on the first try. I'd wager a working HIV vaccine will instantly attract a Nobel prize, if not more than one.

Everyone has heard of the covid strains and the anxiety around them (are the strains much worse? will there be cross strain immunity?). This is like child's play compared to HIV, where essentially every infected person has a separate HIV variant, evolutionally crafted to evade the specific host immune system as best as it can. I would call it "amazing" had it not been inappropriate to call "amazing" a deadly disease.

Read the full paper, they go in detail on how the vaccine would have to create a "portfolio immunity" against the parts of the virus that are known to be most important. For example in terms of the humoral immunity they call them broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs). Those will have to cover a range of variants.

[pas]

Just to make things a bit more interesting (and grim): every HIV patient has multiple variants at the same time. In this regard HIV is pretty much like cancer :(

> Nucleotide sequences of the hypervariable V3 region of HIV-1 obtained from different organs of one patient demonstrated distinct viral variants.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8151287/