“AIDS, 40 years, 0 vaccines! Covid, 10 months, 9 vaccines!” : beware of this misleading comparison

An image shared thousands of times on Facebook since the end of November compares the absence of an HIV vaccine with the imminent arrival of several Covid-19 vaccines. But comparing vaccine research with two such different diseases in this way is misleading, several experts told AFP.

“AIDS, 40 years old -> 0 vaccine! COVID, 10 months -> 9 vaccines! Turn off our televisions and turn on our brains“, we can read in the view below, shared on dozens of Facebook pages in recent days.

“They want us to swallow the snakes, but we won’t fall into the trap“, a user reacts under one of the publications, amid comments tinged with suspicion.

The author of the visual highlights a reality: the race for the Covid-19 vaccine has been conducted at an unprecedented speed.

Since November 9, four manufacturers have announced the effectiveness of their vaccine: Pfizer / BioNTech, Moderna, the British alliance AstraZeneca / University of Oxford and the Russians from the Gamaleïa State Institute.

“Never in history has vaccine research progressed so rapidly“, declared in mid-November the director general of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, after the announcement by the American laboratories Pfizer and the German BioNTech of a vaccine “90% effective”, according to preliminary results.

On Wednesday 2 December, the UK became the first country to approve the mass use of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is due to decide on 29 December “after” on the vaccine of the American-German tandem, and by 12 January on that of the American competitor Moderna.

However, the visual, which, based on a comparison between AIDS and the new coronavirus, asks to be wary of vaccines against Covid-19, it is misleading.

Compare this way “two such different diseases“is”stupid“, judges Professor Jean-Daniel Lelièvre, head of the clinical immunology department at the CHU Henri Mondor and head of clinical research at the Vaccine Research Institute.

Why has Covid-19 vaccine research progressed so rapidly when nearly four decades of research have not been enough to find an effective HIV vaccine?

“It’s quite simple: we basically have vaccines for diseases that cure themselves, that is, for diseases against which we have natural protection. With measles, the flu, hepatitis B, natural immunity is created. In the case of Sars-Cov-2, we will recover because we produce antibodies to Sars-Cov-2. So we reproduce [avec le vaccin] what nature does, because we know exactly how the human body defends itself against this virus “, explains Professor Lelièvre.

“However, if you catch complex infectious diseases, such as HIV, no one will cure them. The immune response against HIV does not take place, it is incomplete. HIV destroys the immune system. This is why the parallelism between [VIH et Sars-Cov-2] it’s impossible“, He adds.

“The HIV virus is very unstable, it mutates a lot, which is not the case with Sars-Cov-2“, observes Serawit Bruck-Landais, director of the Center for Research and Quality in Health at Sidaction, who points out that”there are several HIV subtypes circulating, very different from each other, while for Sars-Cov-2 there are, for the moment, at most two subtypes not very different from each other“.

The rapid arrival of vaccines is explained by “an important technological development, messenger RNA“, used by Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna”,which accelerated the process“, remembers Professor Olivier Schwartz, virologist and head of the Virus and Immunity Unit at the Institut Pasteur.

Furthermore, the Sars-Cov-2 “it is not very different from Mers-Cov and Sars-Cov-1“, which led to an epidemic in Southeast Asia in 2003, notes Professor Lelièvre.

“We had done all this research on Sars-Cov-1 vaccines. We had arrived at phase 1 studies but the disease had stopped, so we could not get to phase 3 studies. From the vaccine point of view, we were in an ideal world, because it is a new virus, but very close to ‘other, of which we had all the knowledge “, He explains.

If Sars-Cov-2 had appeared in the early 1980s, like HIV, vaccine research “it would have taken much longer“, he judges.

The rapid arrival of vaccines against Covid-19 was also made possible by a total acceleration of the research, industrial production and evaluation procedures, supported by colossal funding, as this AFP dispatch explains. Development and marketing of a new vaccine typically takes an average of ten years.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) insists, however, that “the same high regulatory standards of quality, safety and efficacy are applied to Covid-19 vaccines“respect to others.

LCI and Le Parisien also dedicated a review article to this topic.