COVID-19: Chapter 7 - Brags, Beats, and Variants

Yeah, that’s what I was saying. People with active HIV infection still have antibodies.

Read the article closely, they specifically targeted a spike protein that they think will make someone broadly immune. Presumably this is different than basic immune response to HIV.

I’m a little frustrated because I’m ~95% sure HIV is an much more complicated virus than SARS-Covid-2 but I can’t remember exactly why.

I’m Mr. Outdoor is Pretty Safe - and I still don’t want some yahoo yelling from a foot behind me for 3 hours.

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But covid isn’t a tenacious, long lasting virus that insidiously hangs around and evades and co-opts the immune system like HIV or herpes, right? That’s why we’ve never gotten an HIV vaccine I think. Because vaccines rely on the immune response and HIV defeats that.

I think it’s because we’ve spent 30 years and hundreds of billions trying to develop an AIDS vaccine and come up with bupkis.

Nah it’s because at one point I had to have a lot of things about hiv memorized including various proteins, sites of mutations and treatments… now that’s almost all gone as it doesn’t apply to what I do any more

The main think is that it targets immune cells isn’t it? Most people died of the immune deficiency not some virus caused disease process?

Can we do cancer next?

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It’s on the list. I’m holding out for hangnails.

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solving herpes would be amazing

Always thought they were a piece of shit company. Unbelievable.

World is a bunch of communists.

I hope this is true

Governor Abbott wanted to pass up all that poz.

I always thought it was because it was almost constantly mutating in one way or another but my recollection is fuzzy.

I am holding out hope though. My older brother died from AIDS back in 1989. What they have accomplished in treating the disease since then is amazing but this would be something else.

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Pretty sure do laundry and give virus are the same and neither one is Mexico.

This should turn the anti mask crowd around.

So most HIV drugs worked on proteins of the HIV viron like ‘reverse transcriptase’, ‘integrase’, and ‘protease’. All of those work on proteins that exist on the inside of the viral particle.

A quick look seems to be a few ‘entry inhibitors’ that work on stuff on the outside of the viral particle.

My understanding, and I want to explicitly say that this is mostly beyond me, is that the viral proteins inside of the viral particle are easier to mutate. The viral particles on the outside don’t mutate as much for the same reason that the SARS-CoV-2 cannot mutate as much - they have a conserved specific target within the body it has to hit. If it changes too much, it can’t enter the cells it’s supposed to hit.

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I mean, reverse transcription, RNase H activity, and the rest are not exactly functionalities that are easy to happen upon by random chance. Maybe there’s something about the capsid that is somehow much more fixed, but it’s not obvious that is the case. I would hypothesize that there is a ton more selective pressure on the enzymes because those are what drug makers have targeted, while there is much less pressure on the capsid, as it’s comparatively unmolested. That’s not to say that these vaccines cannot work. Indeed, I think there’s a lot of genius in generating an immune response to the virus prior to entering cells rather than shutting down components once it’s in cells. But I would not be surprised if an HIV vaccine is something that would require periodic updates. I would consider that a best case scenario, even, because I think we’ll start seeing capsid escape mutations as soon as there starts to be selective pressure.

Edit: Well, no. HIV is super mutation-prone, but it’s not all that spreadable compared to something like covid. It could be relatively easy to contain escape mutations such that update vaccines for everyone are much less necessary than flu or covid.

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