The very nature of HIV itself explains why a cure is so hard, if not impossible.

All vaccines work by priming your immune system to fight the virus. The vaccine does nothing on its own, it's not a "cure" like an antibiotic that zaps all the virus to death. Your body has to do the work.

HIV directly attacks the very systems that are required by a vaccine to fight off a virus.

It's like aliens invade and require a special gun to defeat their armor, and maybe your engineers will figure it out eventually, but a vaccine is basically sending a guy back in time to give your engineers the weapon technology ahead of time.

Except in the case of HIV, the aliens invading are specifically only interesting in blowing up the gun factories themselves. It doesn't matter if you know what you need to build when your gun factories are all exploding the second they're made.

I hear this "there actually is a cure for HIV" thing on occasion but I suspect it's overwhelmingly only said by people who haven't the slightest clue what HIV even is or how it works. HIV not being cured to this day is in absolutely no way whatsoever any surprise at all. No other virus works like it.

This may shock you, but microbiology and virology is incredibly complicated.

Comparing making a Coronavirus vaccine to an HIV vaccine is the pinnacle of unintelligence.

Nah. The very nature of HIV itself explains why a cure is so hard, if not impossible.

All vaccines work by priming your immune system to fight the virus. The vaccine does nothing on its own, it's not a "cure" like an antibiotic that zaps all the virus to death. Your body has to do the work.

HIV directly attacks the very systems that are required by a vaccine to fight off a virus.

It's like aliens invade and require a special gun to defeat their armor, and maybe your engineers will figure it out eventually, but a vaccine is basically sending a guy back in time to give your engineers the weapon technology ahead of time.

Except in the case of HIV, the aliens invading are specifically only interesting in blowing up the gun factories themselves. It doesn't matter if you know what you need to build when your gun factories are all exploding the second they're made.

I hear this "there actually is a cure for HIV" thing on occasion but I suspect it's overwhelmingly only said by people who haven't the slightest clue what HIV even is or how it works. HIV not being cured to this day is in absolutely no way whatsoever any surprise at all. No other virus works like it. Comparing making a Coronavirus vaccine to an HIV vaccine is probably the pinnacle of unintelligence.