NEW YORK A deeper analysis of the results of an HIV vaccine tested in Thailand suggests that the vaccine may not have been as effective as originally indicated.
When first publicly disclosing the outcome of the Thai trial in September, researchers said the vaccine had lowered the risk of infection by about 31%. That result was modest but statistically significant, meaning it wasn't the result of a fluke. That announcement, coming after two decades of failed HIV vaccine trials, garnered headlines around the world.
Now, two other analyses of the trial data suggests that the results could have been due to pure chance, and therefore the vaccine may not have conferred protection to people after all. The additional data are published today in the New England Journal of Medicine and will be more fully discussed today by researchers attending an AIDS meeting in Paris.
Details of the secondary analysis were first disclosed in The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 12. In an interview at the time, Jerome Kim of the U.S. Army and principal investigator for the trial, acknowledged that he and other scientists knew about the secondary analyses when the first result was publicly disclosed. He said his team had decided not to provide the results of all three analyses because the contradictory results
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