An HIV vaccine is what the world needs now

Prof. Lynn Morris

For the past twenty-five years, medical scientist Professor Lynn Morris, working with others, has been trying to make a vaccine for HIV. Astonishingly, in less than a year, the world has not one but multiple vaccines for COVID-19. How did this happen? Lynn posits that COVID-19 vaccines benefited a lot from the years of investment in HIV research. She asks a simple but essential question: what can we learn from COVID-19 to develop an HIV vaccine more rapidly?

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Lynn is a principal medical scientist in the Centre for HIV and STIs at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), a division of the National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS). She holds a joint appointment as a research professor at Wits University and is an honorary senior scientist at the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA). For the last 3 years she has served as the interim executive director of the NICD.