Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by jl6 on Monday January 31, 2022 @04:17PM (#30154513)

It does sound suspiciously like wishful thinking though, doesn’t it? You can’t sample all parts and all fluids of someone’s body all the time. Maybe trace undetectable levels of the virus can be transmitted, and of course they are going to look like a “no transmission” case if you lack the ability to detect that amount of virus. And that’s either not a problem (if trace levels = no symptoms), or a ticking time bomb waiting to find a host with the conditions that would enable mass viral replication back up to detectable levels.

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by vsef on Monday January 31, 2022 @05:01PM (#30155196)

There is no such thing as a trace/undetectable transmission. These studies have been going on a long time now with large numbers of participants, replicated in multiple countries/different populations. The results are very strong and not based on measuring viral levels.

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by lixtra on Monday January 31, 2022 @04:29PM (#30154708)

> You can’t sample all parts and all fluids of someone’s body all the time. Maybe trace undetectable levels of the virus can be transmitted…

You don’t need to be a 100% sure. Once the risk becomes small enough you can spend your time worrying about other risks.

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by jl6 on Monday January 31, 2022 @04:38PM (#30154835)

Now that may be entirely the right posture, but the triple equals signs in the post upthread did rather imply certainty.

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by austhrow743 on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @02:21AM (#30159552)

I took that to just be because we’re on a programmer heavy site rather than an extreme display of certainty

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by whimsicalism on Monday January 31, 2022 @09:01PM (#30157703)

The standard you are applying is literally not possible to imply anywhere.

Hell, an HIV viron could be created spontaneously through quantum tunneling in your body with some non-zero probability. I think it would be legitimate to triple equal signs that to "not going to happen" though.

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by hashimotonomora on Monday January 31, 2022 @05:53PM (#30155918)

Risks like these are orthogonal and additive. There’s no reason to discard any risk but to hedge them.

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by tomp on Monday January 31, 2022 @06:05PM (#30156073)

Activity-based risks are not additive.

Time spent driving is not time spent having sex (well, hopefully).

So if risk(dying while driving) ~ risk(dying because of sex) ~ 0, you can easily ignore both of those.

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by hashimotonomora on Monday January 31, 2022 @08:31PM (#30157496)

Be careful. The infinite sum of epsilons over an infinite domain and over the time domain can and usually does converge to a finite value in real life.

Also, you can avoid having sex with a HIV-positive person. You can probably not avoid driving. So the fact that a risk may be low is not sufficient to take such risk if you can hedge against it.

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by Retric on Monday January 31, 2022 @09:00PM (#30157700)

It is because everyone dies relatively quickly that you can ignore ultra low risks. Suppose your lifespan was potentially 1 trillion years, how low would your risk tolerance need to be?

Meanwhile doing some once a day with a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance of possibility killing you in 40 years just isn’t worth considering.

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by mlyle on Monday January 31, 2022 @09:14PM (#30157793)

> Suppose your lifespan was potentially 1 trillion years, how low would your risk tolerance need to be?

Depends what your quality lifespan is. If I get sick of everything, that time isn't worth much.

There's also a "time-value" of life.

Cool stuff I can do today may be worth a lot more to me than things I can do 500B years from now. Especially since the person that would be doing them is someone I cannot identify with at all.

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by Retric on Monday January 31, 2022 @09:20PM (#30157828)

I don’t think most peoples 25 year old self can really identify what their 85 year old self will be like. Yet saving for retirement isn’t just about them some time in the future it’s about making you feel better now.

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by mlyle on Monday January 31, 2022 @09:27PM (#30157862)

> I don’t think most peoples 25 year old self can really identify what their 85 year old self will be like.

Yes, and I believe this is a reason why people make choices that adversely affect their 50 year old self. Who's that guy in the future going to be? Why should I care about making it better for him?

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by Retric on Monday January 31, 2022 @09:47PM (#30158017)

You could say the same thing about people drinking heavily only to wake up the next day with a massive hangover. So it isn’t the differences between them that’s causing people to screw over their future self.

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by mlyle on Monday January 31, 2022 @10:30PM (#30158298)

I can't comprehend 1000-year-from-now me. I don't think I would take many actions to improve life for 1000-year-from-now me even if I knew I could live millennia. Doing so does not buy me any comfort today and does not let me "give" to any person that I identify with or recognize as part of me.

I can imagine time scales on a par with how long I've lived and to a lesser extent to the ages of people I identify with.

(500 year from now me would see the first paragraph as exceptionally foolish... and also inevitable. But that fact doesn't change the truth of what I'm saying).

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by dtgriscom on Monday January 31, 2022 @07:54PM (#30157186)

risk(dying while (driving while having sex)) >> 0...

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by throwaway22032 on Monday January 31, 2022 @10:22PM (#30158239)

We feel fairly comfortable in stating that HIV is not transmissible surface-to-surface despite the mathematical fact that strictly there is some miniscule non-zero chance that it could be, this is basically the same thing.

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Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by inglor_cz on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @06:28AM (#30161170)

You need to transmit a certain amount of HIV particles to cause infection. It is called inoculum. In normal sex, it is quite a lot, I wasn't able to find an exact number, but it is in tens of thousands in ther least.

The vast majority of virions seems to be killed by the immune system before they can actually take hold.

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...

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