HIV Vaccine Trial Fails, Researchers Look Towards Other Approaches

Researchers announced on Wednesday that the only HIV vaccine trial that was in advanced stages of testing was unsuccessful. The vaccine was known as Mosaico, and the trial was born of a large public- and private-sector partnership that included the U.S. government and Janssen, a division of pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson. Leaders of the study decided to discontinue it after an independent review of the trial’s findings revealed that the vaccine has no effect on participants’ chances of contracting HIV, calling it “safe but ineffective.” The failure of the Mosaico trial was not totally unexpected, as a similar vaccine was found ineffective in 2021. The effort to create a vaccine for HIV has been plagued by failure since it was first announced by the U.S. government in 1984. However, researchers and advocates are not giving up hope and continue to analyze the results of the trial in search of information that might be helpful to the development of subsequent vaccines. The HRC notes that researchers are still closer to eliminating the HIV virus than ever before, with HIV tests being faster and more effective than ever before, and pre-exposure antiretroviral medications like PrEP have proven to be very successful in preventing infection.