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Published online 21 October 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1035
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HIV vaccine trial under fire
Expert scrutiny casts doubt on 'historic' results.
The sponsors of the largest ever HIV vaccine trial yesterday hailed a "historic" moment as they formally announced the trial's results at an international AIDS vaccine meeting in Paris. The results received rapturous applause from an audience of more than 1,000 HIV researchers.
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So.. a p-value of 0.04... that (roughly) means there's a 96% chance that the difference between treatment groups wasn't purely random chance and also that, ultimately, the vaccine did have something to do with that observed difference. I guess the real question here is how much of the difference between groups is attributed to the effects of the vaccine and how much of that diffference is due to random chance? I'll have to read the paper and see how they graphed their explained data variances.
Rome wasn't built in a day... At least progress is being made and I remember a time when there was no thought of a cure, when discoveries into the inherent nature of the virus deemed HIV imposible to vaccinate against it. Be realistic as well, the Chicken Pox vaccine doesn't prevent infection 100% of the time.
This modified ITT is in keeping with the three RCTs for circumcision in Africa. If the early converters are eliminated then surgery only caused a reduction of ~44%, much less than the popularly reported figure of 60% and it only applies to heterosexual men. If the removal of early converters tipped the balance then the results were nearly statistically significant prior to removal. In the fight against HIV this is still very good news as it seems to impart some level of protection to everyone, not just one segment of the population. The good news is that if this result is valid, as it seems to be, the vaccine may actually be effective in the developed world where heterosexual contact is among the least common means of infection.
Scot Anderson