• Question: Will there ever be a virus where a vaccine will not work? If yes why will a vaccine not work for this virus?

    Asked by anon-310573 on 9 Feb 2022.
    • Photo: David Burnett

      David Burnett answered on 9 Feb 2022:

      HIV is the biggest example of a virus for which we haven’t been able to develop a vaccine (yet! There are a lot of promising trials happening now!).

      This is for a variety of reasons. The main reason specific to HIV is that it can hide out inside our immune cells, preventing the immune system from getting rid of it, allowing it to reinfect the body from these hidden reservoirs. The body then mounts an immune response but it is delayed enough that it allows HIV to form new reservoirs and go back into hiding.

      HIV and other viruses (like SARS-CoV2 and the ‘flu’) are also very error prone when they replicate their genes-this means that they quickly mutate and can make them resistant to vaccines. This is the reason we have to get new flu jabs every year.

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