A secondary analysis of data from the Thai AIDS-vaccine trial — announced last month to much acclaim — suggests that the vaccine might provide some protection against the virus but that the results are not statistically significant. In short, they could have resulted merely from chance.
Initial results from the trial involving more than 16,000 people had shown that the vaccine reduced infections by about 31 percent. But the new analysis, which was part of the trial protocol, showed that it seemed to reduce infections by only 26 percent.
The full results of the three-year trial were published online Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In an editorial, Dr. Raphael Dolin of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston said the overall findings are nonetheless “of potentially great importance to the field of HIV research” because they may yield information about the kinds of immune responses necessary to provide protection against the virus.
