Vaccine against AIDS: a false hope?

An article published on the website of the journal Science casts doubt on the reliability of test results from Phase III AIDS vaccine ALVAC-HIV, that recently had raised hopes.

Sanofi Pasteur and the U.S. military had in fact announced the first positive results, but stressed it was a "partially effective" since the vaccine gave up to 31.2 % protection only. An article has been published on the blog of journalists of Scientific American magazine indicating that further more complete analysis is needed, and some researchers consider the results underestimated.

According to this article, this analysis "has also found that vaccine recipients had fewer infections, but the reduction was not statistically significant and the level of efficiency was slightly lower."

According to the analysis protocol, the effectiveness of the vaccine would only be 26.2% and the probability that this result is due to chance would amount to 16%, well above the 5% level acceptable for such tests. This probability was 4% in the first analysis.

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