Scientists were testing a promising HIV vaccine. Then came Trump’s aid cuts

By Nellie Peyton

South African lab technician Nozipho Mlotshwa was waiting for the test results for a potential HIV vaccine, which has eluded scientists for decades, when the order came from USAID to stop work.

The first round of vaccines she and her colleagues made in Johannesburg had produced an immune response in rabbits, which was promising but not conclusive – so they tweaked the formula and sent off four new versions for pre-clinical tests.

“This was very exciting. We were getting quite good results,” Mlotshwa, 32, told Reuters in the lab in the Antiviral Gene Therapy Research Unit at the city’s University of the Witwatersrand.

Now the animal blood samples containing their results are sitting untouched in a freezer.

A trial of an earlier, separate vaccine candidate, which was about to be tested on humans in South Africa as well as Kenya and Uganda, is also on ice.

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