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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Hey, Shortwavers.
Science correspondent Nate Rott here filling in for Emily and Regina.
Today we're going to talk about a global disease that's long hammered sub-Saharan Africa particularly hard HIV.
Specifically, we're going to talk about a vaccine to fight HIV.
So Ari Daniel, for those who don't recognize your dulcet tones, is a freelance science reporter.
And Ari, I hear there's a pretty remarkable backstory to this vaccine we're going to talk about.
That is correct.
Okay, so where do you want to start?
All right.
Right here, Nate inside a lab at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, South Africa.
It's arrayed with, if you can picture it, half a dozen large green and white freezers.
These are the freezers that contain the samples that are the basis of everything we do in the lab.
This is Penny Moore.
She's a virologist at the University of Wittwatersrand.
Our freezers are named after the seven dwarves.
I've always felt a strong affinity for sleepy.
So you have happy and grumpy, and every freezer in the lab is named after somebody.
So Penny cracks open the lid of Bashful and pulls out a tower of frosty tubes.
It's heavy and hard for me to lift.
So this is blood and cells.
These Nate, are all the samples that have been donated to Penny and her team over and over again for two decades by the same group of 117 South African women.
Whoa.
So just to be clear, Ari.
You mean they collected blood from the same group of women for 20 years.
That's right.
Who are these women?
They live in the communities that are most ravaged by HIV.
And they donate their samples because they hope to see an end to an epidemic that is really, really real for them.
These samples have helped Penny and her team piece together a detailed portrait of the virus over the years, how it infects, how it hides and how much it changes across different parts of the world and even within a single individual.
This research has also helped fight other diseases, including COVID-19, RSV, and cancer.
The amount we have learned from these freezes, it's just astonishing.
And yet, despite all that, Nate Penny actually spent much of last year worrying that it might all amount to nothing.
Why?
Well, because just when she and her colleagues were on the brink of an innovative HIV vaccine trial across Africa, the bottom dropped out.
Linda Gale Becker directs the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation in South Africa.
In many ways, we've kind of had our legs cut off even as we're beginning to run the sprint.
That's a vivid description.
But the team, they steeled their resolve.
They knew the science was sound and the need was urgent.
They insisted on finding a way forward.
Wow.
Okay.
So today on the show, the Pan-Africa HIV vaccine trial that was almost over before it even started.
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Okay, we're back.
Ari, where do we pick up this story?
Well, to explain what was going on, we have to kind of rewind to about a year ago, in early 2025, to a meeting that was held in Zanzibar.
The famous Zanzibar chip.
Zanzibar, Zanzibar, Zanzibar is very far.
You can't get there in a car.
It's too far to Zanzibar.
I've actually been to Zanzibar, Ari, and it is stunningly beautiful.
Have you?
I have, yes.
Well, so you know it's a tropical archipelago off the east coast of Africa.
So, as you so kindly pointed out with your lyrics, very far.
And when Penny was there with her hundred or so colleagues for that meeting, she says it was just crazy hot.
One of those places where you just consider standing up and you break out in a sweat.
The gathering took place in a hotel perched on the edge of a brilliant blue ocean.
There were researchers and clinicians from across Africa, and then there were the international scientific advisors.
They grueled us to within an inch of our lives to make sure that we were doing the very best cutting-edge science we could do with the amount of money we had.
What money are we talking about here?
How much?
Penny and her colleagues had gotten a 45 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, to create a state-of-the-art vaccine to prevent HIV.
The goal was to get teams across the continent to collaborate on developing something that would work in different African communities.
OK, so a vaccine that would work across different parts of the continent, because HIV, as you pointed out, the virus is different from country to country.
Exactly.
And within a country and even between individuals.
So at this meeting in Zanzibar, there was a real feeling of momentum.
Nunu Emkize is a colleague of Penny's and a senior medical scientist.
The excitement was through the roof.
We were at the beginning of something big.
But just as that meeting was about to wrap up, Penny says the mood darkened.
From the number of Americans particularly checking their phones all of a sudden and talking to one another in little huddles.
I got a feeling I know where this is going.
Yep.
As you may recall, Nate President Trump, who'd just been inaugurated, at that point had signed an executive order freezing most foreign aid.
Wow.
And I'm assuming that included this grant.
Yeah.
I remember, at the end of the meeting, USAID colleagues saying to me I'm not sure if I'll see you again.
I completely underestimated how much it would gut the program.
But Penny and her colleagues soon found out.
After returning to Johannesburg, she says the official stop work orders arrived from Washington just weeks before the trial was to begin.
Everything came to a sudden halt.
All the money was gone.
And remember Linda Gale Becker from the top of the episode?
Yeah, she was the one that said that their legs had been cut off before they started sprinting right.
That's the one.
She says when the funding collapsed, she cycled through the stages of grief.
I bet.
I mean, after decades of work by her and her colleagues collecting blood samples and all that work.
There's disbelief in the first instance.
Then there is emotion that basically is angry because we'd worked damn hard.
We'd won this grant and we were doing what we had said we would do.
But soon, this team of researchers decided that they needed to find a different way forward.
This matters too much to not finish the work.
We brought out the begging bowl.
A period of frantic grant writing began and finally they got funding from the South African Medical Research Council and the Gates Foundation.
Okay, well that's good.
So were they able to get another $45 million?
No, they couldn't raise that much, but they did get about $2.2 million.
Okay, that's still money, but a lot less money.
Did they have to scale back their ambitions then?
Of course.
The new grant was focused inside South Africa only, and that meant that they had to sacrifice studying how the vaccine might work against different versions of the virus within different African populations.
Here's Penny Moore again.
It's a bare-bones version.
We will still get the answer, but it's going to cost us time years, which is not trivial because people are getting infected with this virus constantly.
Despite having to reduce the scope of the grant, though Penny told me that HIV vaccine research is farther along than it's ever been.
Ooh, I hear a door.
Are we going back into that noisy seven-door freezer room?
You know it.
It contains all those samples that those 117 women have donated over the years.
These samples have taught us everything we know about HIV, including why the virus is so skilled at evading our body's defenses.
But remarkably, in the blood of a few of these women something pretty special surfaced after they became infected with HIV.
Penny tells me in her office it's something called a broadly neutralizing antibody.
A broadly neutralizing antibody could stop my virus and could stop your virus and could stop an HIV virus from any other person.
And in many cases, up to 90% of global viruses could be stopped by one antibody.
Okay, so this is like a super antibody.
Does it wear a cape?
Not exactly, but you're on the right track Nate, because compared to regular antibodies, these guys are weird looking.
Some have really long arms.
Some have super short arms.
And this oddness gives them a way of dealing with HIV's defenses.
But when these rare antibodies appear naturally in someone's body, they usually emerge too late to help that person living with HIV.
Okay, so they usually emerge too late.
But is there a way for the researchers to somehow like coax the human immune system, let's say to like produce these antibodies before they become infected with HIV?
So they have some defenses?
Bingo.
That is the whole point of this vaccine trial, to figure out how to do that more easily.
Okay, cool.
So, has it started?
Like, is the new vaccine trial underway?
Finally, after nearly a year of delays.
Cool.
I head to the outskirts of Cape Town, where a large brick building rises above Philippi Village, this impoverished township where HIV is rampant.
And a few levels up, I spot Amelia Nthiki, the community liaison officer for the vaccine trials.
This is a great opportunity for South Africa to prove that we can do things in South Africa for South Africa, with South African financing.
Amelia makes her way to a room where 20 or so young women are gathered to hear about participating in the trial.
Who are these 20-some young women, Ari?
Well, all these women are from the community, Nate, including Nandip Hamongo.
She's 25 years old, and she tells me that her community struggles with rape, sex traded for favors, unplanned pregnancies.
Most of us are scared of getting HIV.
Which is why she'd happily be involved in the research.
I'm over the moon, man.
I'm over the moon, yes.
Oh, that's awesome.
Because she's proud to be making a difference.
Yes, a big one, a big difference.
I ask if this team of researchers is able to find a vaccine.
What would a world without HIV be like?
Living free, yeah.
Do we have a sense Ari, of when the first shots of this new vaccine will start going into people's arms?
It already started, Nate, in January, and it's going to continue for some months.
Wow.
I'm excited to hear how this goes.
Thank you so much, Ari, for bringing us this story.
Of course, Nate.
Thanks for having me.
Ari Daniel is a freelance science reporter.
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Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.
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