May 7, 2020
Dear Advocates,
Six months? A year? Longer? Never? How long until there’s a vaccine against COVID-19? How is COVID vaccine research moving so quickly? How do HIV vaccine and COVID-19 vaccine research relate and inform each other? How do we ensure COVID research happens quickly and ethically?
As we approach
HIV Vaccine Awareness Day (HVAD) on May 18, these questions are driving how we think about the ever-evolving global advocacy agenda.
Please
join us for a webinar on Wednesday, May 13 at 10am ET to discuss all of this with Jon Cohen, one of the leading journalists covering both HIV and COVID.
Jon is a
Science staff writer, award-winning journalist and author of
Shots in the Dark: The Wayward Search for an AIDS Vaccine. Jon will discuss the rapidly growing pipeline of COVID vaccine candidates and share insights on how the HIV vaccine field has laid the groundwork for this — along with how COVID research can contribute to the ongoing search for an HIV vaccine.
We’ll also discuss some of the thornier issues emerging in COVID research: just yesterday, the WHO issued a report stating that well-designed “human challenge” studies could accelerate COVID-19 vaccine development. The report articulates important criteria for assessing a challenge study, but they left out the most important one: Until there is an approved treatment, a challenge trial with a potentially fatal and as-yet untreatable pathogen is unacceptable.
See AVAC and TAG’s statement on the report here.
REGISTER HERE.
And stay tuned for details an upcoming webinar in June featuring representatives from the NIH’s
Vaccine Research Center who will discuss some of their leading COVID vaccine candidates, including mRNA candidates, an approach also used in HIV vaccine research.
For the latest on COVID-19 and HIV, visit our special page—
www.avac.org/covid—which includes pipeline updates, how COVID-19 is affecting HIV vaccine and prevention research, previous call recordings and more.
Best,
AVAC
