Fauci Starts His Retirement Reviewing Recent HIV Vaccine Trial Failure

Fauci Starts His Retirement Reviewing Recent HIV Vaccine Trial Failure

The clinical trial for Mosaico, an experimental HIV vaccine regimen developed by Janssen Pharmaceuticals (a division of Johnson & Johnson) with funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under Dr. Anthony Fauci, recently ended in a significant failure.

The only vaccine against H.I.V. still being tested in late-stage clinical trials has proved ineffective, its manufacturer announced on Wednesday, another disappointment in a field long beset by failure.

Dozens of H.I.V. vaccine candidates have been tested and discarded over the past few decades. The latest defeat sets progress toward a vaccine back by three to five years, experts said. Still, other options in early-stage trials may yet turn out to provide a powerful bulwark against H.I.V.

…The trial now ending, called Mosaico, began in 2019 and was led by Janssen Pharmaceuticals, part of Johnson & Johnson. It tested the vaccine in 3,900 cisgender men (those who have always identified as male) and transgender individuals who have sex with cisgender men and transgender individuals, in more than 50 sites in nine countries in North America, South America and in Europe.

The vaccine contained a mosaic of components meant to target several different subtypes of H.I.V. present worldwide. But the immune response it provoked against the virus did not include significant amounts of the so-called neutralizing antibodies that are considered the most powerful weapons against infection.

So just as he started his retirement from the highest-paying federal job, Fauci was interviewed by Yahoo News to comment on this failure.

Years before Fauci became the face of the nation’s COVID-19 vaccine initiative, he was best-known for his work during the HIV/AIDS crisis — spearheading research for treatments since the early days of the discovery of the virus in 1981, when it began wreaking havoc in the gay community. Fauci once described the period before therapeutics were available as “the dark years of my life and career,” and told Yahoo News he had “the experience, the privilege and the pain of for years taking care of persons with HIV who had almost a death sentence every time you had someone get infected.

…Fauci said he was “disappointed” but “not thoroughly surprised” by the result. A year and a half earlier, Janssen announced that a sister study known as Imbokodo had proven to be safe but ineffective at preventing HIV in women in sub-Saharan Africa — which was an ominous sign to researchers that they were probably not going to see a dramatically different result in the Mosaico trial.

In another interview with WebMD, he discussed his future retirement plans.

What I want to do in the next few years, by writing, by lecturing, and by serving in a senior advisory role, is to hopefully inspire young people to go into the field of medicine and science, and perhaps even to consider going into the area of public service.

Almost certainly, I’ll begin working on a memoir. So that’s what I’d like to do over the next few years.

Intriguingly, there is no mention of congressional hearings or responding to Twitter File drops with him as the main focus.

They are delayed til later this month as the journalists need to visit Twitter HQ to finalize the threads

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) February 1, 2023

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