Slashdot Mirror
AIDS Vaccine Is Partially Successful
ifchairscouldtalk writes "A Phase III 'RV 144' study in Thailand succeeded in reducing HIV infection rate in trial with 31.2% effectiveness. The study was conducted by the Thailand Ministry of Public Health and used strains of HIV common in Thailand. It is not clear whether the vaccine, which combines AIDSVAX with Aventis Pasteur ALVAC-HIV canarypox vector, known as 'vCP1521,' would work against other strains in the United States, Africa or elsewhere. Strangely, the vaccine had no effect on levels of HIV in the blood of those who did become infected, providing 'one of the most important and intriguing findings' of the trial, according to Dr Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is one of the trial's sponsors."
I'm not normally a stickler for these, but AIDS is a syndrome, HIV is the virus that causes it. The vaccine can prevent you from acquiring HIV and thence from developing AIDS. It's not a cure, it's a preventative measure.
I was promised flying cars...Why are there no flying cars?
Cool! Hopefully by the time I become sexually active it will have improved much more!
You just got troll'd!
Col. Jerome H. Kim, a physician who is manager of the armyâ(TM)s H.I.V. vaccine program, said half the 16,402 volunteers were given six doses of two vaccines in 2006 and half were given placebos. They then got regular tests for the AIDS virus for three years. Of those who got placebos, 74 became infected, while only 51 of those who got the vaccines did.
Wait, wait, wait. Did they go through the random distribution of people who may get aids? Clearly they did not just infect people with aids afterwards. The only way I can think of them getting these rates is that when someone tested positive for aids who was not in the trial noted their previous partners, then that partner list was cross-referenced with the vaccinated.
Hm, I guess the other way would be if someone who had the vaccine was told by one of their partners that they were infected and that they should get themselves checked.
Regardless, there has to be a significant margin of error on their estimates thanks to AIDS reporting and such.
You should go teach the doctors and scientists what they are doing wrong.
...but their conclusions.
How in the hell could you ever do a controlled experiment like this on people if you dont control their exposure to the infection causing material? The only way you can determind improvements of real thing over placebo is if you intentionally expose the test subjects to the virus...which would be a death sentence.
Their results could mean that the group recieving the test vaccine came into contact with the virus 31.2% less.
1331461 is only semiprime *sigh* Alas - I am just short of 1337.
How is that news for nerds ?
None of us will ever get laid, so that's not stuff that matters...
</cliché>
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
While this is excellent news, and intriguing scientifically, an effectiveness of 31.8% is practically useless in vaccinating a population. Typically you need at least 70% of your population (varies based on virus) vaccinated before you start to see the effects of herd immunity. Even if they vaccinated everyone in Thailand, you wouldn't get this effect.
Furthermore, the low effectiveness is actually a liability; the end result could be mutations in the HIV virus that make it immune to the vaccine. This is part of the reason why the influenza vaccine has limited effectiveness - influenza, like HIV, has a tendency to mutate quickly. If a new strain comes along, like H1N1 for influenza, you're defenseless.
Finally, I think there's a problem with how the vaccine will be perceived. If the vaccine is only 30% effective, I think people will see that as being too risky to even get the shot. There's already (too much IMO) FUD out there against vaccines in general. If you think that you can get influenza from the flu vaccine, there's a strong aversion to taking the HIV vaccine. For a 30% chance at being immune, that's no good. If it were 100%, that would be a totally different story.
The sample sizes were not 74 and 51. The sample size of people vaccinated was "more than 16,000 volunteers". 74 and 51 were just the number of people infected, which is still statistically significant. [to what confidence level, I do not know].
Formerly known as not successful.
I... don't recall the world ever being black and white. I'm pretty sure what you're doing is called "oversimplifying".
I am the lawn!
someone do some analysis on the statistics and tell us all something and get +5
Sure. It's Poisson statistics, so the standard deviation is the square root of the count.
placebo: 74 plus or minus 8.6
vaccine: 51 plus or minus 7.1
The statistical significance of the difference (23) is equal to the standard deviation of the sum (not the difference!) of the counts, so:
difference between placebo and vaccine:
23 (=31%) plus or minus 11
= (2.06 standard deviations)
Assuming they set their criteria for statistical significance at two standard deviations, then they are significant.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Fortunately, that gives the the researchers plenty of time...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Only cures good AIDS, doesn't work on bad AIDS
Why is it that on slashdot of all places that should be full of nerds we get idiots that don't grasp basic statistics and people that mod it up? As long as you got a proper control group it's simple to say "If we assume the true probability is the same, how unlikely is it that we get these results?" Of course there's something about the level of confidence - a 99% confidence means there's a 1% your observation is random fluctuations. But the whole "we reject math and logic because the numbers feel to small" sounds like the results of retarded anti-schooling.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
At least the article has some numbers so we can to the (approximated) maths ourselves. The numbers of infected for medicine/placebo are 51 and 74, respectively. The error of the difference is then sqrt(54+71) = 11 (poissonian statistics). The difference itself is 74-51 = 23, so we can conclude that 23 +/- 11 persons were saved from infection. That means that we're just two standard deviations (23/11) away from the null result. This will happen by coincidence 5% of the time. So if they'd done the study 20 times, you'd expect this outcome once. Now this study has only been done once, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that 20 different AIDS medications have been tested over time, and so it's quite likely to see this outcome once. Conclusion: This warrants further study, but they really haven't proven much yet. In fact, if they were physicists and not physicians they would have proven nothing. Especially since they, by their own admission, cannot explain the result.
Didn't Magic Johnson originally find that money will actually cure your HIV? So, this really isn't new news is it?
Not at all. What this shows is that the vaccine likely works for some subset of the population. That doesn't mean it doesn't work at all. Viagra for example only works for about 60% of men but people don't go screaming that it doesn't work.
Bottom line here is that vaccine or no, you should still practice safe sex (afterall, HIV isn't the only bad disease lurking around out there). However, if this thing has a ~30% chance of making you immune to the disease with no other ill effects then it's certainly worth reducing your chances by that much.
Basically, to break it down, your chances of getting aids comes down to 3 factors (4 now with this in place):
a * b * c * d
Where
a = the chance that your partner is infected
b = the chance that you catch the disease during an encounter with an infected partner (having intercourse with an infected person doesn't guarantee infection)
c = the chance that your protection fails (only comes into play if you used protection - otherwise it's 100%)
d = the chance that your vaccine was ineffective (only comes into play if you actually got vaccinated - otherwise this is 100%)
Everything that is scientifically proven to reduce the final result, even if it doesn't go to 0% in the end, is a success in my opinion.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
It would be unethical to expose all participants to HIV. They did the next best thing.
There's nothing wrong with the basic idea of the study design. Of course, they may have fucked it up, but that's a different situation.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
But I thought AIDS was sent by God as a scourge of teh gheys. So God must hate the 68.8% it doesn't work for, then.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Their results could mean that the group recieving the test vaccine came into contact with the virus 31.2% less.
No, you don't need to control their exposure. You can study the infection rate for the general population, and provided that your study group isn't unusually different from the general population (say, by being all sexually active gay men), you can expect a similar infection rate over time.
yes, there are potentially statistical deviations that could occur, but the larger the sample group and the more test that occur, the less likely this is. Go take some stats classes if you are curious about the methodology, but if they did the trial correctly your suggested interpretation is very unlikely.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I'll never understand what makes the general public think they are qualified to critique scientific studies.
we get idiots that don't grasp basic statistics...
Because not all of us have had statistics. I won't be taking my statistics class until next year and that's only because I'm going back to school to add to my degrees.
While I understand the basics of statistics and how they are generated, don't ask me to do any computations.
Then again, some people are simply beyond help when it comes to accepting facts or well established principles.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The next best thing was to give a placebo such that the control group would be confident in their new-found immunity to HIV, at least as much as the experimental group. Otherwise the control would use more condoms because they're not on the experimental vaccine. This should have been controlled against a normal group with a similar profile as well, and another with a similar profile but specifically taken to safe sex practices.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
But the whole "we reject math and logic because the numbers feel to small" sounds like the results of retarded anti-schooling.
Welcome to America, here's your churro.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
This is why I like IUD + pill + condom... babies are evil.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I take it you haven't seen this ad.
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/lax/878989144.html
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Actually, you can get HIV from any contact with blood to yours, you don't have to do drugs or be a slut to get it. As to a vaccine being a mild form of the disease, now-a-days it's now a dead form. Your body can still develop an immune responce due to dead viral cells, and this is what is done. Of course, IANAScientist/Doctor, so this is what what I have been told.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Er... they *all* underwent the same sex and infection-control education courses, according to the BBC article. Medical researchers don't throw people to the wolves just for the sake of science... at least, not any reputable ones whose research they expect to be followed up.
Worst. Car. Analogy. Ever! You probably think a standard deviation is, "guys who dig chicks with hairy armpits."
Take 16,000 drivers at random. Send half of them through intensive accident avoidance training. Give the other half a fifteen minute lecture on traffic safety and a "Safe Driver" sticker. Let commuting take its course and tote up the body work needed, with only portion of the whole 16,000 subjects actually getting into a fender bender. Now count the number of people in both populations involved in those accidents, seeing if there's a significant statistical difference in numbers between those that got the training and those that didn't.
What you're proposing would mean is sending all 16,000 drivers into a surprise demolition derby.
And if they had never run the test, the results would have been the same. Please, don't push blame onto others, we have enough of that into modern society. There is plenty of education forced down your throat at every turn about HIV/AIDS, if you don't know about it, it is your fault.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Didn't the article say that one group got a vaccine, and the other got a placebo?
"Col. Jerome H. Kim, a physician who is manager of the armyâ(TM)s H.I.V. vaccine program, said half the 16,402 volunteers were given six doses of two vaccines in 2006 and half were given placebos."
Oh yea, that's what it said.
I don't see anything wrong with the basic kind of study. As I said, they may have fucked it up somehow, such as fucking up the selection of the participants and grouping them.
And why would they want to control against additional groups? They're measuring one thing. How effective is the vaccine. Your proposal to control against other groups are actually separate studies. They can and should be run independently at first. I can totally understand them not wanting to add complexity to a study that already has more than 16,000 participants.
So, I still don't see any valid objection as to why this kind of study won't work or is flawed somehow. In fact, this basic type of study is done all the time.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Don't marry anyone who may ahve secretly been sleeping around, don't get a blood transfusion, odn't mkae a mistake.
Sheesh, What kind of idiot is against an HIV/AIDS vaccines?
"This can and does happen with vaccines."
What? cite please.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They gave the vaccine to people who didn't have aids in two groups, and then looked at who got aids after 3 years.
It could just be that people on the placebo took more risks than the people who didn't which is why it is a statistical outlier.
This is the most ridiculously published study I've ever seen, but if they are looking for funding, I guess it's a good way to get it.
The participants wouldn't know if they got the placebo or not, so it shouldn't affect their behavior. The group is large enough that random statistical variation is highly unlikely to show those results. So the study is not ridiculous at all, it was very well done. The vaccine is not effective enough to be practical, but it has some affect, which is a big improvement over what we had before - it's just more work is needed.
It could just be that people on the placebo took more risks than the people who didn't which is why it is a statistical outlier.
Why would they take more risks? The whole point of a placebo is that you don't know if it's a placebo or not. So there's no reason to expect a change in behavior in one group versus the other. In fact, the behavior change should be driven in the other direction. If there was some reason to think that you got the vaccine (say, side effects not present with the placebo), then you would be likely to increase your risky behavior and increase your likelihood of infection! In this case, they got an effect in the other direction -- the treated group had less infections.
Apparently you've never watched old movies. Seriously, color is a recent invention.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
The highest-rising infected group is heterosexual women in their 20s.
Look it up.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Sure. Put the vial of vaccine in the condom. Leave the complex in your bathroom.
Go about your typical monastic, Slashdot lifestyle.
You'll be pretty safe*.
* yes, there is a low likelihood you will be exposed to the HIV virus from non sexual exposure. You can also get hit with a meteor. Accurate to one significant figure (if that). Pay your taxes. Do not taunt happy fun ball.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Apparently you've never watched old movies. Seriously, color is a recent invention.
If you mean color presume you mean discovery, and if you mean invention I presume you mean color TV. And I hope your world isn't your TV young man.
I... don't recall the world ever being black and white. I'm pretty sure what you're doing is called "oversimplifying".
I am the lawn!
The great thing about a vaccine, even if imperfect, is it also reduces the chance that your partner is infected (if the vaccine is widely deployed). Picture the graph of how a sexually transmitted disease potentially spreads, where each node is a person and each edge is a sexual encounter. Now make 30% of the nodes immune to the disease. That's enough to protect a large chunk of graph (much more than just the 30% who are immune).
This is why I like IUD + pill + condom... babies are evil.
I'm in a long term relationship. Same effect.
AIDS is relatively easy to prevent. Don't be a slut, don't do drugs, etc. and the chances of contracting it are miniscule.
Hey my gf is a slut and we go through some decent lengths to keep her safe. Other people just randomly hook up "once in a while" and pick up diseases almost instantly. It's relatively hard to prevent if you don't want to mold yourself into some repeated image society wants for you... I happen to prefer my partner express what she really wants, and carry her on that path. I had one girl I asked out that was a fucking crazy nympho but "didn't want to be a slut" even though she was all steamy over like every hot guy she saw, I told her I'd help keep her level... and another that was shy about it but "really wanted to try everything" and was into group sex, and I support her in that.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
A vaccine is designed to give you a mild form of the disease that you're trying to prevent.
That is incorrect - although exposing a person to the mild form is a method.
The whole idea is to provoke an immune response (and "teach" the immune system to react ) to something similar to the disease.
This could be, as you say, a weakened form of the disease - or it could be another disease (google cowpox smallpox ), or it could be a protein or some other substance that the body identifies with the disease. For example, some of the recent cancer vaccines are products of chemical synthesis (pharmaceuticals) which is not derived from cancer.
I used to think I was somewhat intelligent...and then I read your post... :(
The total working group for this test was around 16,000 people. Only 125 actually became infected with HIV during those 3 years. The infected portion shows about 1/3 more in the placebo group. So yes, the sample is statistically significant, and someone wasted a mod point.
Who is John Cabal?
There's a reasonably probability that the half with the "real" vaccine will have less car accidents, thus showing progress in my vaccine! TLDR:
What statistical methodology leads you to think that the half with the "real" vaccine will have 30% fewer car accidents?
There is plenty of education forced down your throat at every turn about HIV/AIDS, if you don't know about it, it is your fault.
There's a lot of misinformation out there too. For example, consider all of the conspiracy theories about AIDS. In places where the populace is not well-educated, it's no surprise that these beliefs take hold, particularly in light of past abuses like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.
From your attitude I take it you're involved in science somehow, have a clue what's going on, and consider yourself qualified.
It's clear grandparent doesn't understand the concept of a blind study (where the test subjects don't know what group he's in). Considering that the whole point of science is the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, rather than being condescending to him you might try explaining how these trials are done so that's not a factor.
Thanks for making people think we're all elitists.
No, the world used to be black and white. I have video and photos that prove it.
Simply for additional study. Do safe practices actually DRASTICALLY increase your resistance? What about the control group "Selective with partners" that wants to "get to know you" and try to determine if you seem sane rather than just fucking nameless strangers??
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I'm not saying they purposely took more risk, I'm just saying it may have just so happened to be that way, that the group with the placebo took more risk than the one with the regular drug.
That's why the whole setup is bogus.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
"modern society" != Thailand (or most places in Africa, etc.)
If you don't know about it and you're an American, then yes -- it's your fault. But the rest of the world is not like this.
An African friend of mine told a story where a well-meaning group of aid workers went to a rural village in Africa and explained to them that using condoms during sex would protect against HIV. They didn't have model penises so they had people use their thumbs to practice putting condoms on. A year later, the village had ordered lots of condoms but HIV rates hadn't gone down. Trouble was, the people would put the condoms on their thumbs and then fuck.
The existing battery of drugs is enough to put HIV into remission. Your immune system will remain healthy and the virus particles will essentially disappear. But it's somewhere inside you; if you stop taking those drugs, it eventually comes back although you may have to wait.
HIV has long been known to hide somewhere in the body after drugs have eliminated the actual virus particles. They found where recently; it integrates its sequence into the DNA of T-cells, and the promoter at the start of the viral sequence is capped by a repressor protein. Once it comes off its DNA binding site, viral proteins start getting transcribed again.
They actually developed a drug that can kick it off there and make your AIDS come back again.
Why is it that on slashdot of all places that should be full of nerds we get idiots that don't grasp basic statistics and people that mod it up? As long as you got a proper control group it's simple to say "If we assume the true probability is the same, how unlikely is it that we get these results?" Of course there's something about the level of confidence - a 99% confidence means there's a 1% your observation is random fluctuations. But the whole "we reject math and logic because the numbers feel to small" sounds like the results of retarded anti-schooling.
True, but I don't think it's anti-math, I think it is a deeply ingrained sense that anytime anyone breaks out statistics, its because they're using it to lie about something. I blame it on the overuse of them in overbearing advertising (4/5 doctors agree that the Happy Time Fun Company antibacterial whatever, made from all organic compounds, will kill 99.9% of bacteria*)
* (in microscopic fine print) Bacteria that was killed was either harmless bacteria or crazy moon bacteria you will never interact with. Harmful bacteria is unharmed by all Happy Time products. None of the above statements are evaluated by the FDA. Our product does nothing at best, and is harmful to you at worst.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
> There's a reasonably probability that the half with the "real" vaccine will > have less car accidents...
Statistical significance.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Agreed. They ought to start administering this to the whores.
You forgot the vasectomy.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
That's how random-assignment experimental design is done. It's not bogus. It's very well understood both statistically and philosophically. I'm sorry you don't like it, but it's been the basis of the scientific method for a couple hundred years...
I'd like to thank you for using your posting nym and responding fairly to the criticism offered before you crawled back into your hole. In fact, I shall refrain from grammar nazi-ing your obviously inadvertent typo out of respect for your display of integrity. Have a modest but sincere "Bravo."
Who is John Cabal?
Last Friday's 20/20 was about a some middle-age guy who bedded middle-age women almost every day and infected at least a dozen of them (proven in court by DNA analysis). He must of have had a very effective virus or technique, because infection usually doesnt happen in just a few times. He got 45 years for knowing recklessness. But this was less than two years of his exploits. There is suggestion it was going on for over 12 years and there are many other victims.
The point is that some demographics think they are "safe" because they arent connected with risky types, i.e. gays, druggies, promiscuous youth. But sex is something people lie the most about, and you can never be sure.
P.S. The show & court trial did examine the issue of whether there could be "victims" if there was consensual relations. That wasnt fully resolved in my mind.
I understand the principle behind the randomization, but if you aren't accounting for their propensity to engage in risky behavior that would get them the disease, how does a vaccine get tested in that instance?
I mean ultimately, all you proved is that group B is more likely to get HIV than group A. I have seen random studies done plenty of times, so to avoid bias, but this avoids bias and avoid accuracy too.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bioterror/vacc_nf.html is the best description I found of how vaccines are made.
As a side note, all the new biology books that I've seen (2) don't consider viruses to be alive. So instead of alive/dead, they are active/inactive.
This page and this page indicate that the study was double-blind. If it was, then I do not see how your worry is reasonable. If both groups were unaware of whether they received the treatment or not, then I do not see how one group that happened to be the control group would reliably act differently than the experimental group. Am I missing something? Or are you claiming that once people believe they have the vaccine, that they will have more unprotected sex and thus increase their risk of contracting HIV?
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
That's why you randomize, to avoid having to measure and control for the propensity to engage in risky behavior. I'm really puzzled what you think you're trying to argue. This is the simplest design in the world. Two equal groups of randomly-assigned people. One group gets a treatment, one gets a placebo. Neither group knows which group they're in. Measure the outcome. How would you do it better?
Because Slashdot houses people who are clever enough to poke obvious holes in research but either lack the mathematical skills, the energy or the disposition to determine whether their vague objection is meaningful? My personal theory has long been that tech folk are underused cognitively, so they do not gain an adequate "respect" for the difficulties inherent in other fields (this may also due to the type of personality that is attracted to tech-like work). Scan through any Slashdot thread on psychology and/or economics and you'll find droves of people who seem to think that those respective disciplines have overlooked some minor issue. The arrogance is helpful in the sense that you can see through the various falsehoods that are considered true in those disciplines, but it also can contribute to the type of sloppy thinking that you have a problem with.
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
Unfortunately, as the article notes, the sample groups may themselves be problematic. A previous study of another vaccine that was found to *increase* infection rates may not have been dangerous; they just neglected to control for circumcision and intravenous drug use. Given this study dates back to before the end of the previous study, their samples may be skewed the opposite direction. Circumcision has been found to reduce the risk of infection by 40-70%. IV drug use is insanely dangerous (I don't know the exact multiplier, but it is rather high). If the test group had a couple hundred extra circumcised individuals, or a dozen or so IV drug users, it could easily skew the results.
Of course, this is still overlooking another problem with the vaccine. It's not one injection, or even one plus a booster or two. It's a two vaccine regimen, with six injections of each component, for twelve total shots (they may eventually be combined, but that all depends on whether the components react with each other outside the body). And the duration of the protective effect is unknown, and likely short (since the vaccine doesn't seem to trigger the production of antibodies). Even if it was incredibly cheap, it's hard to get people to follow up for a second MMR shot, or keep up to date on their tetanus, both of which protect against diseases which are easier to catch without engaging in risky behavior. Can you imagine asking people to pay a few hundred dollars (a guess based on the cost of Gardasil), and visit the doctor half a dozen times to get such a relatively small benefit (reducing risk by about a third, with only two years of testing)?
Even if we assume the samples are good, this is only a first step, and a very short one at that.
In response to the PP: I suspect the confidence level is 95%. Most published studies require that level of precision, and no one likes to hamstring themselves by demanding greater confidence; after all, they spent a lot of money and rejecting the drug would waste it. Of course, if you've ever played D&D, you know how often you get fumbles or critical successes. 95% means the odds of it being insignificant could be as high as the odds of fumbling a roll.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
that's all well and good, but if you don't understand statistics, you probably shouldn't be complaining about the statistics in a study that is undergoing peer review.
I'm not saying you're complaining about the study, I just don't think the excuse you presented holds water.
I have developed my own vaccine to HIV!
Simply subscribing to Slashdot makes you statistically 50% less susceptible to HIV!
I will take my 1 million dollar award in ten 100,000 dollar bills.
Seriously the study needs to be repeated and verified before anyone gets too excited.
It is not surprising that this was developed in Thailand due to the large sex trade there. Which makes me wonder about the demographic of the test subjects. Because of the large number of sex trade workers, any significant number in one group or the other will taint the results. If they were ALL sex trade workers that would be something different, however the article does not examine that detail. It could be that one group just happened to get 30% more sex trade workers than the other.
Also Slashdot I hate you and your stupid editor (not the person, the thing I am trying to type in).
Because the subjects are smarter than you and know that there's more than one type of vaccine and they aren't all attenuated vaccines.
16,402 volunteers ...is that I can travel to Thailand and have sex with random people for 3 years, and I only have a 0.9% chance of getting HIV?
2006
74 Infected Placebo
51 Infected Vaccine
This isn't so much a medical study as it is a tourism promotion aimed at a target audience. Supply and Demand!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you RTFA, you might not have to post such silly nonsense.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
that's all well and good, but if you don't understand statistics, you probably shouldn't be complaining about the statistics in a study that is undergoing peer review.
I'm not saying you're complaining about the study, I just don't think the excuse you presented holds water.
that's all well and good, but if you don't understand how the government/economy works, you shouldn't be complaining about the president when there is a recession?
People complain for the sake of complaining, and usually those who complain the loudest know the least about what they're complaining about. I cover an escalation spot on a technical helldesk, and I've heard people bitch about some of the biggest non-issues I've ever heard. Sometimes their bitch was about things they were entirely wrong about. It's called misplaced aggression. People have to bitch at everything they can because it's illegal to just go out and kill the person who pissed you off to begin with.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
how is it that so few people on slashdot understand the concept of controlled trials.
This trial had a control group - if the control group is infected at a rate that is statistically significantly higher than the test group, the vaccine is at least partially effective with a certain confidence interval.
Use of condoms, exposure rate, etc don't matter if you randomly select your groups and properly blind them.
Heh. Look who posted this story. CmdrTaco. I don't think that is a coincidence, do you?
And why the shitting crikey are you using the binomial distribution? HIV infection is a rare event with numerous chances to happen, so it will be well modelled by a Poisson distribution.
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Dr. Fauci said that scientists would seldom consider licensing a vaccine less than 70 or 80 percent effective, but he added,"If you have a product that's even a little bit protective, you want to look at the blood samples and figure out what particular response was effective and direct research from there."
They don't expect to be selling this as is - they know it's not good enough. Instead, they're going to use the results to further research until they can produce a better, practical vaccine.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Don't be too concerned, i think a Humanities undergrad just happened to get the first post this time, that's all.
Of course there's something about the level of confidence - a 99% confidence means there's a 1% your observation is random fluctuations.
Explanations of confidence intervals are one of the most frequently mistaken pieces of stats comments. The correct explanation goes something like this: If your results are significant at the 5% level, then that means that if there was no difference between the two groups, you would observe results at least this unlikely less than 5% of the time by random chance. We cannot say that the hypothesis (the vaccine works) is 95% likely to be true; it either is or isn't. What we can say is how *unlikely* we would be to observe this result purely by luck, in the absence of any actual difference.
You say "just fucking nameless strangers" like it is a bad thing. :)
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Helping queer's and druggy's.
Instead of spreading hate- why not work on your English? There are no apostrophes in the plural form of "queers" or "druggies". Furthermore, "druggie" is not spelled "druggy".
Hi, everybody!
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
The exact same idiots that are against sex education/condom education in schools.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
I'm not implying it is. Probably should have said "All the rest of the world is not like this" to make that explicit. I used America as an example because it's most likely that the GGP is American, considering the readership of ./
Finally, I think there's a problem with how the vaccine will be perceived. If the vaccine is only 30% effective, I think people will see that as being too risky to even get the shot.
I'd be willing to bet you'd also get a lot of people who would get the vaccine, and thus engage in more risky behavior, figuring they've got a 1-in-3 shot "if I happen to have sex with someone who has HIV, and...." You'll also get people saying to their partners "hey, don't worry, I got the vaccine"...whether they did or not.
It'll be even worse if the vaccine becomes 100% effective; say hello to skyrocketing rates of other STD's. At least a good chunk of the other ones are curable. HIV is the big nuclear scare for safe sex; without it, everyone's gonna get a bit less careful.
Please help metamoderate.
In this case neither had the disease though. Obviously, they can't expose the individuals to the disease purposely.
My problem with the random assignment is that you have no way of measuring whether one group had more risky sex or not. So you aren't measuring whether the drug works at all, because if by chance, Group A just had less risky sex and Group B had more, the chances are obviously higher for Group B to get infected. Thus, the measurement of the drug preventing the disease is skewed.
I don't know how to do it 'better', the only way to do that is to get people to willingly have sex with those with HIV and see how it works out, but obviously that's immoral and unethical and just plain mean, so the only way to measure seems to be the way they conducted -- unfortunately without capturing their sexual behaviors and whether they had sex with HIV infected people, the ultimate result of this study seems pointless to me, at least.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
If you can randomly assign 16000 people to two groups, and have all the risk takers end up in group A instead of group B, you have really, really, really bad luck.
Imagine that you have 16000 ping pong balls, 8000 of them are white, 8000 of them are black. (let's say that black ones are risk takers) Randomly assign them to two groups. What are the chances that group A has a significantly higher proportion of black balls than group B? If statistics is correct, there's going to be damn near a 50/50 distribution of white and black balls in both groups. If both groups have an equal number of risk takers and risk avoiders, then you can't blame the result on the behavior of the group.
Yes, there's always the possibility that you will flip a coin 16000 times, and it will come up tails 12000 times instead of the predicted 8000. The chances of that are very, very small however. Does this make sense now?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
AIDS is relatively easy to prevent. Don't be a slut, don't do drugs, etc. and the chances of contracting it are miniscule
Wouldn't the world be a much nicer place if you could sleep with whoever you want and take the drugs that you want and not have to worry about disease?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm going to guess that computer people are over-represented here, and it's been my experience that IT people and programmers are largely self-taught, which means that while they can be quite intelligent in a lot of different areas, they tend to have really glaring gaps in their understanding of things, and statistics is one of the really common ones.
I can't tell you how many arguments I've had with people who couldn't grasp really basic things about statistics only to have them argue "I know what I'm talking about because I'm a programmer" (argument from authority fallacy).
I think it's because computer nerds expect things to be true or false without all the messiness of statistics.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Scan through any Slashdot thread on psychology and/or economics and you'll find droves of people who seem to think that those respective disciplines have overlooked some minor issue
Given the track record of the fields of psychology and economics, it's certain that those respective disciplines have overlooked some major issues.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I seem to recall shades of gray in old movies.
...rather than just fucking nameless strangers??
Phew! I'm safe. All the strangers I've done the horizontal mambo with had names. I can't tell you what they were, but I know for certain that they had names.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
This doesn't always work so well in theory, but if you have 16,000 people split into two groups, then you have a pretty low probability of the results being skewed just by chance (that is what confidence interval means by the way).
Of course, that's only worthwhile if the study sample wasn't flawed from the get go. If it was, they'll be devoting resources to research that, by definition, won't produce useful results.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Yep, it didn't come out until the 50's and it was pretty grainy color for a while.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
If you're going to quote stats, get it right.
The #1 growing AIDS population is BLACK and HISPANIC woman in their 20's. No, I'm not a racist, but these are the facts you carefully omitted.
Wouldn't the world be a much nicer place if you could sleep with whoever you want
Absolutely not! God wants you to only have sex with your wife, whom you married in a church, which cost thousands of dollars!
Every time a man ejaculates outside of his wife (in the missionary position) it's murder of a child which might be otherwise conceived, or might be a born a bastard, and then cannot get into heaven (as per Deuteronomy 23:2)!
Using birth control is *MURDER*, and not using birth control with someone who is not your wife is *WORSE* than *MURDER* because it damns the child's soul!
I wasn't aware that "BLACK and HISPANIC" was a sexual orientation. Thanks for the clarification.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I wasn't aware that 20's was a sexual orientation either.
"Druggie" is not a word, so I am not certain how you are correcting its spelling.
Hey! I was a humanities undergrad (philosophy), and had to bathe daily in statistics and scientific methodology. I'm not saying all humanities undergrads were in the same boat, but you still made a false generalization. Not all humanities people are rank morons, or completely uninformed. I think the morons are pretty well uniformly distributed throughout ALL disciplines.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
'Or are you claiming that once people believe they have the vaccine, that they will have more unprotected sex and thus increase their risk of contracting HIV?'
Of course they would. Perhaps you enjoy having sex with a piece of rubber but some of us prefer actual contact. Eliminating STD's and circumcision are two of the greatest causes known to man.
Replace "IV Drug use" with "sharing needles" and I would agree with your point on this issue. The problem with the language is that it discriminates against drug use. Drug use does not spread HIV, reducing need availability does.
I would agree that the study should concentrate on uncircumcised men since ideally we shouldn't have to hack off the male genitals.
"protect against diseases which are easier to catch without engaging in risky behavior. Can you imagine asking people to pay a few hundred dollars (a guess based on the cost of Gardasil), and visit the doctor half a dozen times to get such a relatively small benefit (reducing risk by about a third, with only two years of testing)?"
You believe that eliminating the risk from anonymous sex would be a small benefit? The flaw in your thought is that people actively avoid being stabbed by rusty nails. Nobody wants to have to avoid or restrict sex. Ideally we could safely couple with as many partners as we could manage. An aids vaccine wouldn't get us there but an aids vaccine coupled with a male version of the pill would certainly help.
According to numerous online sources, raw numbers are:
51 out of 8187 found infected in the vaccinated group;
74 out of 8198 found infected in the control group.
The most basic course of statistics tells how to proceed from here: test if the null hypothesis (vaccine has no effect) remains plausible despite this evidence. Conditions are ideal for the chi-squared test.
We get Observed values 51, 74, 8147, 8123; Expected values 62.504, 62.496, 8135.5, 8134.5; then sum((O-E)^2/E) = 4.267, with two degrees of freedom.
Conclusion: the null hypohesis is rejected with only 88% confidence level.
This is not enough to confortably say that the vaccine has any benefit. Odds of the contrary are about 1/17.
This is much less reason to trust that the vaccine reduce infection rate by 31.1%, as reported in some press articles. Odds are 1/2 that it is less efficient than this.
Francois Grieu
Due to ethical reasons, they couldn't do a proper study by administering the vaccine and then trying to infect people with HIV, and observing the results. Instead they sort of turned people loose into the wild, and an unknown number of those were actually exposed to the HIV virus in each group. Perhaps the incidence of HIV exposure is a random process, perhaps not. There could be unseen biases between the two groups which could account for the 10 or so person difference in infection rates. The vaccine might actually be 0% effective.
Lazy. I just tear the door off a microwave oven, set to popcorn, and stand in front of it with it at the same level as my man bits.
>>We cannot say that the hypothesis (the vaccine works) is 95% likely to be true; it either is or isn't. What we can say is how *unlikely* we would be to observe this result purely by luck, in the absence of any actual difference.
Well, it depends if you subscribe to the Bayesian model of statistical truth or not. This is actually a fairly significant philosophical point.
Because not all of us have had statistics. I won't be taking my statistics class until next year and that's only because I'm going back to school to add to my degrees.
It's such a shame that it's impossible to learn things without taking a class on them. If only someone would collect knowledge in a form that is accessible to the general public. Maybe they could print it onto paper pages, bind them together, and store them in large, public buildings. Or possibly they could use these newfangled 'computer' things. I hear they can be networked together to make access to information easy...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Merriam-Webster disagrees with you.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Well, several dictionaries do not agree with you.
Here is the entry from dictionary.com -- note that according to the Random House entry, "druggy" is an acceptable alternate spelling, contrary to the GP. The Merriam-Webster entry also indicates "druggy" as a variant spelling.
Here is the entry from the Oxford English Dictionary, widely considered to be authoritative on all dialects of the English language.
So, the GP may have been wrong for taking you (or whoever) to task for the "druggy" spelling, but you are most certainly wrong that it is not a word. Next time, do a little research. A slang term that has entered common use is still a word, regardless of its origins.
Also, the GP was very much right for calling out the hate speech for what it was.
If you subscribe to that model, you still can't say that the vaccine is 95% likely to work; you need a prior estimate for the likelihood the vaccine works, which you can then modify based on the results of the study.
Sure, I'll tell that to a rape victim: all five or six that got HIV that way out of the millions who got it some other way.
And sure, my comment may not have been PC, but read the facts! Of the people who would be helped by a vaccine (i.e. not fetuses or infants), the second most common way to get it is from anal. Even unprotected penis-to-vagina sex still has a low risk, which casts doubt on the whole rape thing.
Seriously, refraining from engaging in a type of sex that's disgusting, unhealthy, and painful anyway is a pretty cheap way to protect yourself. If you're not willing to do that, um, *why* again, are we spending billions to protect you? Sheesh. I know of a billion people more deserving of that money than individuals (NOT NECESSARILY GAY) who just *have to have to have to* have one kind of sex without consequences. Ya know?
It's not a pleasant fact, but the truth is like that.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Wow, that's stupid and ignorant.
I mean really ignorant and really stupid, I want to get onto why you are wrong but I have to take a moment to digest the enormous stupidity and ignorance of this statement.
Because the high rates of teenage pregnancies in the US compared to other western nations has proven time and time again that abstinence works(TM). You are asking people to ignore all of their biological urges and imperatives. Now apply the abstinence philosophy to an Issan (Thailand's poorest region) girl who has little else to do but eat, sleep, work, talk or screw (and Thai ladies are good at four of those five activities for a reason). There's little TV or mobile phone access because they are fairly poor (The minimum wage in the Phuket province is 209 Baht (THB) per day and Phuket is one of the richest and most expensive provinces in Thailand). Add to this that there is no stigmata against sex in Buddhist cultures. Abstinence as protection against pregnancies and STD's is a complete and utter failure.
AIDS is however quite easy to prevent, use a condom. Don't give me guff about how it doesn't feel right or I cant get a hard on (there's a pill for that, most of us dont need it though), that's nothing compared to not getting an STD. Saying that Druggies and Whores are responsible for STD is just as stupid and ignorant as those saying HIV is god punishing the gays. It's just you projecting your dislikes without any evidence or subjective thought.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
What do you mean? Don't chicks dig people who design cranes? You could always use that as a pickup line or something...
"Yes... and no. Nowadays you have to really trust someone to go unprotected. The stuff you can catch is bad enough you might as well catch fire."
Yeah.... to quote myself in the post you replied to.
"Eliminating STD's and circumcision are two of the greatest causes known to man."
So I guess... we agree?
Circumcision is the greatest cause known to man? What? I mean besides that your penis doesn't smell like cheese, so she doesn't complain and refuse to suck it....
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I am quite confident that both disciplines have gaping holes in their respective theoretical frameworks. I do not see how this entails that an amateur with little to no experience in the field ought to be taken remotely seriously.
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
Condoms and safe sex are the only useful tools until there is a vaccine that is quite a bit more effective
That would only be true if condoms and this vaccine were mutually exclusive. Sure a condom does a lot more to reduce your chances, but you don't have to choose one or the other. Condoms can and do fail. Having yet another chance to dodge that bullet when they do doesn't hurt a thing.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Isn't that what alli does?
Where are you getting 50% from?
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
You do know that what is cut off is for a man what a clit is for a woman right? It cuts off most of your nerves leaving you will only a tiny piece of what you are supposed to have. It never grows back, you are desensitized for life.
I think you will also find that circumcision is not a substitute for a shower.
would have been better if it hadn't been followed soon by
ResidntGeek
I think part of the reason people want fat foods is because of how the foods make them feel, not just because of how the foods taste.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.