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At last count, Longmont’s David Alessi has lost at least 100 of his friends to AIDS over the past 40 years. He still mourns their deaths and is frustrated that a vaccine has yet to be discovered to prevent more lives from being taken by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
“I am so sick and tired of my life being one consecutive funeral service rolling into another,” the 72-year-old Alessi said last week. “I am frustrated that after 40 years of HIV and AIDS being around, there just always seems to be some other priority.”
He said COVID-19 has grabbed the attention of countries, media and researchers and put an HIV vaccination — once again — on the back burner. “HIV is just not on the radar anymore. That seems to have burned out a long time ago,” Alessi said.
“I just want to live to see a vaccine before I die,” added Alessi, who tested positive for HIV in January 1987. A year later he was diagnosed with AIDS.
Since then, he has been on drugs that fend off AIDS. He also fights autoimmune diseases that attack his body, made vulnerable by HIV.
“That’s just the reality of where I am at,” Alessi said. “You just have to be aware of what you have to do to take care of yourself.”
Alessi recently joined others — including members of the Boulder County AIDS Project — for the annual AIDS Candlelight Memorial in Boulder, which is held every third Sunday in May. The event raises awareness of the continued fight against HIV, which has so far eluded a vaccine.
That fact was highlighted on May 18, which is HIV Vaccine Awareness Day, an observance led by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The lack of a vaccine and the toll HIV and AIDS have had on people’s lives were sharply brought into focus by those at the candlelight memorial, said Sarah Annecone, development director for the Boulder County AIDS project.
“A speaker talked about how the media and others have talked about how COVID-19 was the biggest pandemic since the Spanish Flu in 1918,” Annecone said. “Wait a minute! What about that other pandemic, the AIDS pandemic?”
An estimated 33 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the AIDS epidemic over 40 years ago. In 2019, there were 15,815 deaths among adults and adolescents with diagnosed HIV in the US and dependent areas, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
About 38 million people were living with HIV around the world in 2019, according to the CDC.
Still, fewer people see HIV and AIDS as a threat largely because younger people have not grown up witnessing their peers die with HIV-related illnesses, Annecone said.
There are also more effective drugs being used to fight AIDS that allow people to live longer and healthier lives, Annecone said. BCAP provides help in finding insurance coverage for medicines as well, she said.
Anger remains, however over the lack of an end-all vaccine for HIV, Annecone said. Those who have had HIV for decades and saw friends die from the virus feel especially defeated. “I know it can be a lonely existence for them,” she said.
They are also more susceptible to disease than their peers without HIV, Annecone said. “They still have an impaired immune system that leaves them vulnerable.”
The Colorado Department of Public Health estimates there are about 590 people living with HIV in a four-county area that includes Boulder and Broomfield counties, she said. At least 14 percent are also unaware they are living with HIV, Annecone said.
“It’s so important for people to get tested, so they can start treatment almost immediately,” she said.
An HIV vaccine has been largely stymied largely because of the complexity of the virus, say researchers. That includes the lack of broadly reactive neutralizing antibodies that could fight it, said Dan H. Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and William Bosworth Castle Professor Castle Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Barouch was quoted in the medical website Healio.
Barouch also said advances in HIV vaccine research have not met high expectations especially when compared with the success of COVID-19 vaccine development, which Barouch said began after just 41 cases and one death was reported, according to Healio.
“The scientific community responded (to COVID) in a way that it never responded before in terms of the rapid generation of knowledge of the virology and immunology of disinfection, as well as the development of therapeutics and, of course, the development of vaccines,” Barouch said.
Alessi said he takes some comfort that the research done on HIV helped in developing the COVD-19 vaccine. He remains skeptical, however, that a vaccine will arrive anytime soon.
“I just don’t think it is a high priority like it should be,” said Alessi. He has an “undetectable" diagnosis, which means he cannot spread HIV to anyone else. “That is a huge relief. it makes me feel less like a pariah.”
