The New York Times Seventeen years have passed since federal officials and a prominent scientist, in a moment of wishful thinking that they will never live down, stood up at a news conference and announced that an AIDS vaccine would be ready for testing in two years, and on the market in three. There is still no AIDS vaccine.
None is even close.
An AIDS vaccine never was a given. Not every disease gives way to a vaccine. AIDS is nothing like polio, measles, smallpox or any other viral infection in humans for which a vaccine has been created. People do not routinely become immune to HIV, the AIDS virus, after being infected. The virus destroys the immune system itself, killing the very cells that should repel it and that a vaccine should call to action.