Glaxo Wellcome recently established a partnership with the UN AIDS program, in which Glaxo provides medical training and technical support to AIDS professionals, in exchange for limiting use of the drugs to areas with reliable and effective ongoing treatment. Thus international aid efforts should bridge the gap between the cost of research and a distribution, rather than simply lowering the wholesale value. The Need for a Vaccine Science has not yet developed an applicable HIV vaccine. Some public-sector research has had partial success preventing the disease in animal models. In the private sector, most of the drug industry has stayed away from vaccine research.
Vaccines are less financially viable than ongoing drug treatments for several reasons.
If a vaccine works, it only needs to be bought once for each patient. Currently, healthy people typically have considerably less demand for vaccines than sick patients do for treatments. Every vaccine carries a small risk of transmitting the disease to currently healthy patients, making drug companies fear huge lawsuits. Governments have the power to overcome all of these obstacles. They need to establish an ethical and legal framework for developing and testing vaccines, a system balancing the risks of a vaccine against the risks of inaction.