Matt Yglesias

15 Responses to “Good News on HIV Vaccine”

1. greg Says:
   September 24th, 2009 at 5:35 am

   The results are marginally significant, at best. It’s a promising result, but the study doesn’t yet demonstrate that a vaccine can be made to work. However, if the result is duplicated, then the vaccine is definitely good enough to use. Cutting infections by 30% would be huge. May want to change your post a little but, as both sentences are a little bit off.

2. Just Dropping By Says:
   September 24th, 2009 at 8:29 am

   May want to change your post a little but, as both sentences are a little bit off.

   Oh, Greg, poor naive Greg….

3. zed Says:
   September 24th, 2009 at 9:11 am

   Those results are… weird. Additionally, no journal that these results will be published in is cited, making this a publication by press release. It is possible that the findings are real, but I am frankly suspicious. It is possible that serious methodological flaws may have resulted in what was admitted to be minor and only slightly significant results.

4. kolahun Says:
   September 24th, 2009 at 9:33 am

   matt,

   completely premature analysis. maybe the study’s a gateway into a new paradigm of vaccine thought. and maybe not.

   usually the ‘maybes’ are outnumbered 1 to millions by the ‘maybe nots’.

   give them some time to analyze the data, check methodologic flaws and, most importantly reproduce the results before we accept the results.

5. The CAP Cleaning Staff Says:
   September 24th, 2009 at 10:26 am

   give them some time to analyze the data, check methodologic flaws and, most importantly reproduce the results before we accept the results.

   Considering that this study took three years, it’s a tall order to ask them to reproduce the results before we consider them. As a scientist I do appreciate the need for caution, but given the number of lives at stake one has to hope that this kind of long-term study (particularly one run by the U.S. Army and billed as the largest study of its kind) is designed correctly from the get-go.

6. heedless Says:
   September 24th, 2009 at 11:11 am

   CCS,

   I have some sympathy for the desire to get anything that might help out there as quickly as possible. The trouble is that it’s bad science and bad medicine.

   The “Do something now!” mentality is why the field of obesity, diet, and exercise is such a mess, and why the food pyramid gets a drastic and contradictory overhaul every ten years or so. There is so much poorly controlled data out there, and so many of the experts have perverse incentives (because their research is associated with a profitable, if not necessarily useful, fad diet) that it is nearly impossible to distinguish good studies from bad.

   As painful as it is to wait, it really is important to do the due diligence first.

7. wahoofive Says:
   September 24th, 2009 at 11:34 am

   Can you imagine the firestorm from social conservatives if a vaccine ever gets developed? Think of the resistance to the HPV vaccine, viewed by conservatives as a license for young girls to be promiscuous. AIDS is still the faggot’s disease as far as they’re concerned, and they’ll scream like crazy to keep insurers from covering it, keep doctors from telling their patients about it, keep government from subsidizing it, etc.

8. Realist Says:
   September 24th, 2009 at 12:16 pm

   The authors of the study are far too enthusiastic about their result given their borderline p-value (a p-value that would be entirely obliterated if one were to correct for the number of HIV vaccine trials which have been done so far). It’s especially annoying when they claim confusion that the infected had the same amount of virus in the control and vaccine group. That’s not confusing, that’s exactly what we would expect under a false positive.

   I don’t doubt their methodology, it sounds standard; their result just isn’t very exciting. But they want to get published, of course.

9. Hector Says:
   September 24th, 2009 at 1:09 pm

   Re: The results are marginally significant, at best.

   Can somoene link to a p-value for the study? The article that Yglesias links to doesn’t have details.

10. Rob Mac Says:
    September 24th, 2009 at 2:23 pm

    I don’t understand how it would be possible to measure the effectiveness of an HIV vaccine. An AIDS test looks for the presence of HIV antibodies. An HIV vaccine should cause the body to produce HIV antibodies. So wouldn’t anyone who had received an HIV vaccine test positive for AIDS?

11. Anna Says:
    September 24th, 2009 at 2:27 pm

    I would like to see these kinds of articles in mass media. Why they do not appear?

    From Exposing the Mith of the Germ Theory by Arthur M. Baker

    “So-called “contagious diseases” like AIDS, venereal disease and athlete’s foot are no more contagious than any other
    disease—but it does serve certain commercial interests to make people believe that they are.
    Basically, acceptance of the theory of contagion is contingent upon acceptance of the germ theory of disease—that
    specific bacteria or “viruses” produce specific disease symptoms. This theory has been repeatedly demonstrated as incorrect in the scientific field, and was even admitted
    by Pasteur as being incorrect.
    Nevertheless, the germ theory and the theory of contagion are
    perpetuated by our modem medical system whose prestige, profits and power are largely based on belief in this erroneous theory.
    The belief in contagion is difficult to overcome since almost
    everyone’s mind has been similarly ‘infected’ by exploitive ‘health care’ industries that have a vested interest in disease and suffering and in perpetuating such erroneous beliefs.
    Basically, the populace believes what the medical establishment wants it to. The theory of contagion maintains the demand for their drug, medical and hospital practices.
    If you live healthfully you will likely never suffer disease.

    http://www.homoeopathytraining.co.uk/docs%20main/downloads/Exposing%20the%20Myth%20of%20the%20GERM%20THEORY.pdf

    Please make that article widespread, thanks

12. wiley Says:
    September 24th, 2009 at 3:46 pm

    I don’t think the placebo affect is going to be particularly useful in stopping the AIDS virus. The idea that we humans are so unlike every other biological organism on the planet that we are impervious to the effects of other organisms is the stuff of religious blather.

13. Brett Says:
    September 24th, 2009 at 4:03 pm

    I’d wait and see if the results stand-up in duplication trials and peer review before getting too optimistic. I’ve seen announcements like this before, and they’ve always turned out bad (mostly because AIDS is the type of virus that more or less seems made to resist vaccination, essentially because of its extremely high mutation rate).

14. Jason Says:
    September 24th, 2009 at 4:15 pm

    Check out the comments on the article (one, of the editors recommended, and, no, I didn’t write it). There is a pretty egregious abuse of statistics here (i.e. about 1 in 20 times this experiment would have come out this way even if the vaccine was totally ineffective).

    My fellow physicist friend drew my attention to this, and we’re convinced that it’s pretty egregious.

    (He suggested that you simply look at sqrt(8201) = 90.6 being larger than the number of infections in either the placebo or vaccine groups. The standard error of the sample mean decays like 1/sqrt(n), so measuring *anything* in this group, we might expect to be off by 90 or so — e.g. as a political poll, we’d expect an error of +/-0.1% for a poll with 8000 people.)

15. duh Says:
    September 24th, 2009 at 6:45 pm

    Stop. having. unprotected. sex. Problem solved.