I Bet Stacey Abrams Knows There’s No HIV Vaccine

Brian Kemp Does Not

I’ve been writing about HIV a lot lately and I just took my younger daughter for her 11-year-old vaccinations, so while I had planned to get away from vaccines this week, I couldn’t let Governor Brian Kemp’s repeated suggestion that there is a vaccine to prevent AIDS go unchecked. As I was doing that, I started remembering that time when Rick Perry became the most unlikely supporter of HPV vaccine mandates and got yelled at by Michelle Bachman, once the craziest politician to run for president. Please join me for this timely trip down memory lane. Also, please join me in crossing our fingers that the Covid-19 vaccine does become available for kids under 12 by Halloween as suggested this week. It’s the 7th day of school here and approximately 1/3 of the sixth graders have been sent home to quarantine because of possible exposure. These kids switch classes multiple times a day, so even if we limit our definition of close contact to the kids on the four sides of them in each class, we’re talking 28 possible exposures a day not counting gym and lunch. Unless we get vaccines soon, I think middle schoolers will be out of school more often than not. Finally, join me in hoping that no rap stars or politicians say something absurd about vaccines in the next week so we can focus on other—potentially sexier—Wednesday topics.

Brian Kemp and the Non-Existent AIDS Vaccine

Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp has said repeatedly that he will not support any vaccine or mask mandates despite the fact that his state continues to average over 5,000 Covid-19 cases per day. Every time he says it, he notes that mandates were a failure when the AIDS vaccine first came out. Most recently he said this on Erik Erikson’s podcast:

“That is basically how the AIDS vaccine worked. People wouldn’t take it early on because it was mandated, they started educating people and now it is doing a lot of good out there. Same scenario, different year that we are dealing with right now.”

Interesting perspective, only there is no vaccine that can prevent HIV/AIDS, no one has ever tried to mandate it, and it’s not out there doing a lot of good.

Maybe He Thinks PrEP is a Vaccine

The effort to find a vaccine to prevent HIV has yet to be successful despite decades of false hope. The most recent HIV vaccine trial ended in August after data revealed the shots were only about 25% effective. The trial, called Imbokodo, was a joint project between Johnson & Johnson, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. It had been running since 2017 and included 2,600 young women in five sub-Saharan African countries. A separate trial in South Africa ended in 2020 when preliminary data found more people in the vaccine group than in the placebo group had become infected. 

Future studies using the MRNA technology developed for fighting Covid-19 are in the works but there has yet to be a successful vaccine trial.

It is possible that Governor Kemp was thinking of PrEP, which is a prevention strategy suggested for people who do not have HIV but are considered high risk for acquiring the virus. PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, involves taking antiretroviral medication every day. Research has shown that when taken correctly PrEP can be up to 99% effective. Still, it’s not a vaccine, it’s not meant for everyone, and no one has ever tried to mandate it.

Maybe He Remembered Rick’s Woes

Kemp’s office suggests that he was talking about the HPV vaccine. This would have made more sense if he’d referred to his mythical vaccine as the HIV vaccine which in-and-of-itself would have made more sense since HIV is a virus and AIDS is a diagnosis. If there were a vaccine it would be preventing HIV and his excuse could be that Ps and Is look a lot alike. Let’s give his press person the benefit of the doubt and run with this.

Perhaps Kemp is recalling his buddy former Texas Governor Rick Perry’s issues with the HPV vaccine in the early 2000s. (For the record, I have no idea if the two are friends or have ever met but they seem like they’d be part of some secret society of douchey GOP governors.) 

As I’ve explained before, HPV is a virus that can be sexually transmitted. It’s so infectious that almost all sexually active adults will get it at some point in their lives. Most will never know it because the body can clear the virus on its own. Some types of HPV, however, cause genital warts and others cause cervical cancer as well as cancers of the genitals, anus, head, neck, and throat. The current version of the HPV vaccine—called Gardasil-9—protects against nine cancer-causing types. Experts believe that widespread use of the vaccine could prevent 90% of these cancers.

The CDC recommends that young people get the HPV vaccine as part of their routine vaccinations at 11 or 12. The early age is to ensure that young people have all of their shots (it used to be a three-shot series but now is given as two shots) before they become sexually active. Public health groups have stopped short of suggesting that the HPV vaccine be mandated for schools, however, because unlike measles, mumps, or, say Covid-19, HPV is not spread through casual contact in public settings.

Back in 2007, right after and earlier version of Gardasil was approved by the FDA, however, Rick Perry, of all people, signed an executive order mandating that all female students in Texas be vaccinated before entering 6th grade. He got skewered for it by both traditional anti-vaxxers (if there is such a thing) and the abstinence-only crowd who argued that vaccinating kids against a sexually transmitted infection would give them license to be slutty.

Perry’s motives for the mandate were always a little suspect given his other positions on women’s health and his connection with Merck, the pharmaceutical company that makes the vaccine, but he said the right things at the time:

“I understand the concern some of my great and dear friends have about requiring this vaccine, which is why parents can opt out if they so choose…I refuse to look a young woman in the eye who suffers from this form of cancer and tell her that we could have stopped it, but we didn’t. Others may focus on the cause of this cancer. I will stay focused on the cure.”

Then he ran for president, got slammed for it in a debate with fellow primary candidate Michelle Bachman (remember when we thought a Bachman presidency was the scariest possibility), and called the mandate a mistake.

Maybe He’s Just a Hypocritical Politician

So, Brian Kemp may be mixing up letters and trying to avoid this kind of controversy for when he runs for president in 2024 (Heaven help us all). Yet Kemp’s state already mandates many vaccines for school-aged children. Children entering pre-K or Kindergarten in Georgia are required to be vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, chicken pox, polio, Hepatitis A and B, and Haemophilus influenzae type B. In 7th grade they must prove they’ve also gotten the bacterial meningitis vaccine and before starting 11th grade they must show proof of a booster for this vaccine.

It appears that in addition to being based on false history, Kemp’s resistance to vaccine mandates is both hypocritical and political (he’s up for re-election next year). I suppose this comes as no surprise from a man who was both candidate and official vote counter in his own election.