Director of WACCBIP explains why HIV vaccine has not been found

Director of the West African Center for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP), Professor Gordon Awandare has explained why a vaccine for Covid-19 has been found after a little over one year of its existence but scientists are still looking for a cure for HIV/AIDS after so many years since the disease sprouted its head.
Interviewed by Y107.9FM’s Rev. Erskine on the Y-Leaderboard series, he explained that Covid-19 came as an extraordinary crisis that required utmost attention.
“What Covid made us do was to drop everything we were doing and try to solve it. Our resources, our mental capacity, our scientific expertise, our prayers and everything we had as a human race was basically marshalled towards finding a solution to the pandemic.
In our lifetime, no disease has ever affected everybody so equally, irrespective of whether you’re rich or poor, short or tall or whatever. Look at the airlines. Even some of the most powerful airlines are struggling so people realized that if we don’t find a solution to this, the human race is threatened”, he explained.
The medical expert added that another reason is that there were a lot of resources dedicated to finding a vaccine to fight the virus. He said, “A lot of biotech companies were putting all their top-quality science into this and there’s also been a lot of advances so we put all the expertise and all the techniques from different fields together in trying to find the best solution”.
Lastly, Prof. Awandare notified that clinical trials are one thing that delay vaccine development. He explained that to determine if the vaccine works, they need to find thousands of people who have been exposed to the virus so that they can test it.
“Some of them are given the vaccine and some are given a fake vaccinemlike water or something and then we check how many of those who were given the vaccine got sick and how many of those who were given the fake vaccine got sick also. That will tell if the vaccine is making a difference so, for other diseases that are not common, it takes a long time to get that number of people who are exposed to take that test”, he shared.
By: Maureen Dedei Quaye