HIV, COVID-19 and fake news a deadly cocktail for CSL and Scott Morrison

Putting the two biggest health crises in the past 30 years - HIV and COVID-19 - in the same sentence was never going to end well. Picture: iStock

Putting the two biggest health crises in the past 30 years — HIV and COVID-19 — in the same sentence was never going to end well for CSL and the Morrison government.

Although the COVID-19 vaccine that CSL and the University of Queensland had spent 11 months developing was safe — with few, if any, side effects — the fact that false positive HIV tests were picked up in all clinical trial participants sealed the homegrown vaccine’s fate.

Such is the level of fear and stigma still attached to HIV — despite the majority of those infected living fairly healthy lives with regular antiretroviral therapy — that the Morrison government believed the mere mention of it would undermine public confidence in the global COVID-19 vaccine effort.

To be clear, none of the 216 participants in the CSL and University of Queensland trial were ever infected with HIV. None. They were all false positives.

There was none of the neurological nasties that happened a couple of months ago in the AstraZeneca trial.

The “molecular clamp” technology the Australian researchers developed for the vaccine — as opposed to using a live virus like other candidates — worked like a dream and is surely a feat on which Australian scientists, who have practically worked around the clock since January, should be commended.

But the way the vaccine was engineered interfered with HIV diagnostics, and fake news and misleading messages spread across social media are difficult to combat, particularly with something as sensitive as a COVID-19 vaccine.

“If it had been anything else other than HIV it probably wouldn’t have had the same degree of concern by ourselves or government,” said Russell Basser, senior vice president research and development at CSL’s vaccine arm Seqirus.

“It wasn’t so much HIV sort of per se, as creating confusion and the way information gets shared — the ability for social media to propagate messages that you can’t control.”

Now the Morrison government has terminated its contract with CSL to produce 50 million doses of the vaccine, which were part of a broader $1.7bn deal to protect Australians against the highly infectious virus.

An innovative way to vaccinate against COVID-19, developed by Australian scientists, has been abandoned. Trials have been cancelled and CSL said its development is no longer part of its $1bn a year research and development budget.

“At no stage did we believe all four vaccines would get through that process,” Scott Morrison said.

But to put it in perspective, clinical trials can throw up a range of different side effects — some innocuous, others very serious — such as the neurological illnesses that developed in some of the participants in AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine trial.

When AstraZeneca discovered the neurological conditions, it halted its trial, evaluated the data to ensure it was safe and effective, and, when it got the all clear, progressed with its phase three trial. Such is the regular course of drug development.

The Morrison government has almost doubled its orders of AstraZeneca’s vaccine to more than 50 million doses.

The irony is, CSL will produce each of those 50 million doses under licence at its advanced manufacturing facility in Melbourne at Broadmeadows.

CSL was never planning to make serious money from the University of Queensland vaccine. It’s still expecting to deliver the same earnings — as forecast — this financial year, despite the Morrison government terminating the University of Queensland contract.

Dr Basser said many of the vaccines under development has exceeded their effectiveness target to the point that yearly boosters might not be necessary

“This was a project where we were going to cover costs and we might have made some extra revenue for one or two seasons,” Dr Basser said.

“This project was never material in our projections, and stopping the project has not altered our guidance for the year.”

But he conceded that halting the project was the “right public health decision for Australia”.

“Hopefully a couple of vaccines will be approved shortly by the TGA (Therapeutic Goods Administration). We felt on balance, on benefit versus risk, we thought there was too much risk in undermining the confidence in the whole program.”