An HIV vaccine is what the world needs now | Lynn Morris | TEDxJohannesburgSalon 

For the past twenty-five years, medical scientist Professor Lynn Morris, working with others, has been trying to make a vaccine for HIV. Astonishingly, in less than a year, the world has not one but multiple vaccines for COVID-19. How did this happen? Lynn posits that COVID-19 vaccines benefited a lot from the years of investment in HIV research. She asks a simple but essential question: what can we learn from COVID-19 to develop an HIV vaccine more rapidly? The answers are clear and unambiguous. We need to create a robust pipeline, developing and testing multiple concepts simultaneously. We need to run parallel processes, with testing, manufacturing, and approval-seeking overlapping one another. We need to increase our financial investment - the amount of money put into COVID-19 is up to ten times higher than the funding of HIV in any given year. We also need to incentivise industry, including sectors that are not traditionally involved in vaccine development. One way to do that is for governments to give advanced commitments to buy the vaccines once manufacturers have proved their efficacy. COVID-19 vaccines will undoubtedly turn the pandemic around, Lynn asserts. They will save lives and livelihoods. We need to do the same for HIV. Then we can indeed begin to dream of an AIDS-free world. Lynn is a principal medical scientist in the Centre for HIV and STIs at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), a division of the National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS). She holds a joint appointment as a research professor at Wits University and is an honorary senior scientist at the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA). For the last 3 years she has served as the interim executive director of the NICD. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at www.ted.com/tedx