Another AIDS Vaccine Failure
I have approximately three minutes as I have to go out for the day. However, I did see "Vaccine Failure is Setback in AIDS Fight" by David Brown in the Washington Post this morning. The payoff comes on page three–right at the end:
The researchers did not have any reason to believe the vaccine might be harmful (although they acknowledged it might not be effective), and in any case such a study would have required quite a large number of monkeys, which are expensive to acquire and maintain for research.
Instead, researchers vaccinated a relatively small number of monkeys with the Merck vaccine and then injected them with the monkey equivalent of HIV in a manner that guaranteed they would become infected. Those animals did much better over the long run than infected but unvaccinated ones.
That was once enough to move a vaccine into human trials. But it probably never will be again.
So they’re either going to have to raise (and waste) more money for more monkeys, or find a less expensive, more efficient way. I guess when enough people are unintentionally harmed or die after numerous nonhuman animals are harmed and then killed, that’s when the red flag goes up.
Humans die from stuff tested “successfully” on animals all the time. Testing on animals is actually worse than flipping a coin: animal testing is 50/50, but at least a coin won’t give you false positives and false negatives at all, much less on a regular basis!
So why is stuff tested on animals? Because there’s a lot of cash to be made and “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
Animal testing is up with genocide and superstition in the long list of human folly.