Following the topic of yesterday’s blog, it’s worth noting that today’s front-page headline in the UK newspaper The Independent reads “Is it time to give up the search for an Aids vaccine?” The paper apparently polled “more than 35 leading Aids scientists” in Britain and the USA and discovered a distinctly gloomy outlook. Overall, most of these leading scientists claimed to be less optimistic now about the prospects for an AIDS vaccine than they were 4 years ago.

Much of the pessimism has naturally been borne of the early stoppage of the STEP trial last year. But as we said in an Editorial at the time, an awful lot was learned in the process: about how to do these trials in practice, about the problems with the adenovirus vector, etc. Generating doubt about the likelihood of ever producing an effective vaccine seems rather unwise. It took getting on for half a century to produce vaccines for polio and measles: we’re only halfway there with AIDS!

But what do you think? Should we abandon 25 years of research and divert the equivalent funding towards other prevention and treatment efforts? Let’s have our own poll among the real experts…  Zoe Mullan

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