Disease-modifying HIV vaccines could increase epidemic severity

According to a study from the United States, "Most current candidate HIV vaccines seem to produce little protection against infection, but reduce viral load and slow the decline in CD4 lymphocyte numbers. Such disease-modifying vaccines could potentially provide important population-level benefits by reducing transmission, but could possibly also increase transmission. We address the following question: could disease-modifying HIV vaccines cause population-level perversity (i.e., increase epidemic severity)' By analyzing a mathematical model and defining a new quantity, the fitness ratio, we show that...

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