Have you jumped on the PrEP bandwagon? Is there still too much slut shaming associated with the Pre–exposure prophylaxis for you to talk about it with your doctor? Does your doctor even know about PrEP? many don't and that is upsetting. All of that is upsetting. When there is an option to lessen HIV/AIDS in the world and there's so many emotional, intellectual, social roadblocks …
How do we get past those roadblocks? With great news.
During the Global Citizen Festival, Johnson & Johnson announce the company will soon bring an HIV vaccine to large scale efficacy testing in humans, making it the first global vaccine to reach this stage of testing and be designed to treat all strains of HIV.
“Today we are thrilled to announce for the first time, that we are going into large scale efficacy testing of the HIV vaccine in humans. As a scientist and a physician,” Paul Stoffels, Chief Scientific Officer, Johnson & Johnson. “I can tell you that these results make me more optimistic than ever before that we get to an HIV vaccine in our lifetime.”
How promising is this new medical breakthrough? The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has proven to be 100% effective at achieving immunity against every strain of HIV after a small trial of 350 volunteers.
“We are hoping to take this vaccine to the next phase,” said Paul Stoffels, Johnson & Johnson’s chief scientific officer. “We all know that science is unpredictable. But these results make me more optimistic than ever that we will get to a vaccine in our lifetime and prevent people from HIV forever.”
The Gates Foundation and the National Institute of Health will help Johnson & Jonshon test the vaccine on humans. The trial will target the most at-risk population and involve 2,600 young women between 18-35 years of age in five different African countries.
Taking the numbers from 350 to 2,900 is a great goal, but J&J has not too loft goals. A rate of 50% would be wonderful, but of course the hopes are that 90% or more would occur.
But what does that mean for us? Africa is far away from Europe and the Americas and how long would we have to wait for the trials to become something we see at our doctor's office? The hope is that if there is success, we may see the vaccine being implemented within 5 years.
So do we go on PrEP until then? That is a personal decision to make.
HIV/AIDS activist Whoopi Goldberg introduced Johnson and Johnson’s Chief Scientific Officer, Paul Stoffels, who spoke about a major breakthrough in the fight against this disease — large scale efficacy testing of the HIV vaccine in humans — at Global Citizen Festival NYC on September 23.
Since 1981 the disease has killed 36 million people and 2 million new people are infected each year.
h/t: globalcitizen.org