Dennis NormileScience's COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.The backers of Australia's homegrown COVID-19 vaccine candidate today announced a halt to its further development, after some of the first people to receive the vaccine in a safety trial generated antibodies to an unintended target, the AIDS virus.
A small fragment of an HIV protein is a component of the vaccine use to add stability to the intended antibody target, the spike protein of the pandemic coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.Although the added component didn’t represent an actual infection with HIV, the vaccine developers and the Australian government concluded a widespread rollout of the candidate would interfere with HIV diagnostic.