3 ms·
The parent's comment is referencing the availability of highly effective PREP (https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/prep.html https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/prep.html
by opprobium 3y ago
The parent's comment is referencing the availability of highly effective PREP (https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/prep.html https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/prep.html), not treatment after infection.
The ethical issue is that to study people taking an unproven vaccine, you do have to specifically have participants not take an existing well proven prevention medicine. Since existing prep works well enough that you would never be able to determine vaccine efficacy if they were using it. Having a vaccine is still strictly better, but that's the issue, not comparing to lifetime treatment.
To your uncertainty, effective treatment (reducing viral load to undetectable) reduces transmission to zero (https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/treatment-prevention https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/treatment-prev...).
- thefurdrake 3y agoAh. I misunderstood the function of PREP/assumed it was the treatment given to people who are already infected. I don't know why, because I feel like I've heard about PREP before. That does kind of muddy the waters a bit. I think it's better for everyone to have more treatment options, in this case, and a vaccine is certainly better, but ... deciding who has to take the hit in the risk department to develop one is odd. It still feels like it should be ethically possible. Logically, we don't want to pigeonhole ourselves into something of a "local minimum" when it comes to a viable solution to a problem, IE a situation where we have something that kind looks better than the surrounding avenues of research and the energy investment needed to find a lower-risk, higher-reward outcome is too high to be worth bothering.
- opprobium 3y agoTotally agree that it has to be ethically possible.