Durban – Health Minister, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, says South Africans should welcome any initiative aimed at finding an effective HIV vaccine, adding that many battles against diseases were won using vaccines.
He was reacting to the announcement that South Africa is set to launch a ground breaking AMP study or Antibody Mediated Prevention study soon, the biggest in seven years.
Speaking to SAnews on the side-lines of the 21st International AIDS Conference in Durban, on Thursday, Minister Motsoaledi said any study that could lead to a possible effective vaccine to prevent HIV should be welcomed.
“We know that for both TB and HIV/AIDS we need a vaccine urgently. If we can’t get a vaccine, we won’t break the back of these diseases. We need a game changer and a vaccine for both HIV and AIDS will be a huge game changer,” he said.
He said South Africa has to move with speed to find an HIV vaccine, adding that vaccines are important not just a cure.
“I overheard somebody saying, why these scientist can’t just find a cure for AIDS and I said to myself, this person doesn’t know anything. There were many diseases in this world for which a cure was never found but today they are no longer there because of vaccines,” the Minister said.
An example of such diseases that were eliminated using vaccines are small pox in the 1970s as well as polio.
“Nobody ever talks about those diseases today and there was never a cure found for them but we used vaccines.”
For the past four days, delegates at the AIDS conference have been debating the issue of ensuring that there is enough funding towards research to find an effective HIV preventative vaccine. US billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates also stressed the importance of an HIV vaccine during his presentation to the conference on Wednesday.
On Thursday, Minister Motsoaledi said a vaccine would save South Africa billions of rands which currently go towards treatment.
He also said while South Africa was spending a considerable large amount of money, government is actually getting the antiretroviral drugs cheaper.
In 2002, he said, to put one person on ARVs used to cost R10 000 and today the amount has dropped by a whopping 53% to R1 700 for one person. It has come down tremendously.
“We are running the biggest ARV programme in the country so there must be economies of scale,” said Minister Motsoaledi.
Between 2014 and 2016, South Africa spent around 2 billion US dollars on antiretroviral drugs.
Minister Motsoaledi said government had also introduced innovation in order to make it easy for people to collect their ARVs. The chronic medicine programme allows recipients of ARV drugs to collect them at their place of choice.
The drugs are delivered by service providers to various points. This can be either a pharmacist, a medical practitioner or church. Minister Motsoeledi said over 400 000 people have already been put on the programme and the Department of Health was targeting a million people.
The five-day AIDS conference ends on Friday. - SAnews.gov.za
