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"Promising" Covid-19 Vaccine Trial Halted in Australia After Positive HIV Results in Test Subjects (later deemed as false positives)

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 How could a positive later become a false positive? When actual anti bodies were generated? It doesn't sound like PCR testing.

(Initial testing for mono is often negative first time around but then a positive shows up)

Just the basics ...

HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) /AIDS = Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and is caused by HIV.

 The names HIV and AIDS can be confusing because both terms describe the same disease. 

Think of AIDS as advanced HIV disease. A person with AIDS has an immune system so weakened by HIV that the person usually becomes sick from one of several opportunistic infections or cancers

When a person becomes infected with HIV, that person becomes "HIV positive" and will always be HIV positive.

Once a person has been diagnosed with AIDS, she or he is always considered to have AIDS, even if that person's CD4 count goes up again and/or they recover from the disease that defined their AIDS diagnosis.

Australia's Promising Covid Vaccine?

Promising Covid vaccine in Australia abandoned after trial participants test false positive for HIV

How were the false positives ascertained?  If they tested positive wouldn't they always be positive.

When a person becomes infected with HIV,that person becomes "HIV positive" and will always be HIV positive.

This is where it gets' interesting

But it explained that as part of the vaccine’s design, the university’s researchers included a small fragment of a protein taken from the HIV virus, glycoprotein 41 (gp41), which was used to create a “molecular clamp” to hold the vaccine’s synthetic virus in place.

In other words they used the HIV virus in the vaccine

“Although the university’s researchers have confirmed the protein fragment poses absolutely no health risk to people who have taken the vaccine, they have identified a partial antibody response to it among trial participants. This has the potential to interfere with some HIV screening tests that look for these antibodies – leading to a false positive test result,” the statement said. 
If there was 'absolutely no risk" then why would the body mount a response?

If your body has generated some antibodies would you really have a false positive test for HIV?

That doesn't make sense to me.

Link

Trials of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by the University of Queensland and CSL have been abandoned after several participants returned false positive readings on HIV tests.

“What they found with their platform, which has this molecular clamp technology, was that they could use less of that virus, the COVID protein … and it means that they could actually scale up production of the vaccine very quickly,” she said.

“It’s in that molecular clamp that they were using components derived from the HIV virus.

“It just means they produce a partial antibody response to components of the HIV virus, which means in certain lab tests it comes back looking as if they’re positive.

“If that person was someone who they wanted to screen for HIV then the screening might not work.”

 Link

A biosecurity expert says Australia has a “big problem” with its plan to secure COVID-19 vaccines.

The federal government has terminated a deal to buy more than 50 million doses of a potential vaccine developed by the University of Queensland and CSL, after several participants returned false positive readings on HIV tests.

 Link

The trial itself enrolled 216 participants from the state of Queensland in Australia. CSL previously stated it could upscale production to 100 million doses by the end of 2021 had the vaccine completed its clinical trial program.
No word on how many of the 216 participants had HIV "false positives"


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