Vaccine pair

These scientific studies are set up very carefully. They typically divide the people in the study into two groups, one group gets the real medicine, the second group gets a placebo (a fake medicine)-- and no one with any contact with the patient knows who is in what group. This means that the only difference between the two groups is the medicine being studied.

If the group who gets the real medicine does significantly better than the group that gets the fake medicine, you can be confident that the medicine has an effect (since other than that, these two groups were treated exactly the same).

I continue to find this just goofy as hell. Is this author seriously attempting to say that someone set up a vaccine trial for HIV/AIDS, and then knowingly infected more than 100 people? If this is supposed to be true, someone needs to arrest that son of a bitch.

Thanks for replying.
But grammatically speaking, none of you have explained what puzzled me.

Take a look at this paragragh:
The U.S.-funded study involving more than 16,000 volunteers in
Thailand found that pairing the vaccines reduced the number of
infections by 31%, a moderate performance that researchers say
may point the way to vaccines reliable enough for widespread use.

-----------------------------------------------
Obviously, "pairing the vaccines " refers to "making the two vaccines as a pair, and using the pair to treat AIDS patients".

Do you agree with me?

The study tells us:
If you use vaccine ALVAC, or vaccine VaxGen's AIDSVAX alone to prevent HIV infection, you will fail as earlier tests indicated. But when you mix the two vaccines (pairing the two vaccines), it works. But the scientists don't know how the pair work.

Do you agree with me?

Yes.

I don't think anyone intentionally infected anyone.

16,000 participants in the study.

Thank you.

Well, i see little difference between willfully infecting people and allowing them to become infected if they were known to be at risk. Essentially, in the case of this disease, that's a death sentence.

The vaccines don't "work"--that would imply no one got sick. They ae "somewhat more effective" than a placebo, but not really a whole lot--51 infected versus 74.

Problem is, Set, infection is due to something experience has taught us you can't stop people doing--having sex and shooting up illegal drugs, so the question is, how do you minimize the risk.

oristar's original sentence is pretty hard to strighten out:
"And can you be certain about that the success of preventing from infecting HIV is because the patients were injected with the mix of the vaccine pair?"

Maybe:

Can we be certain that injectons of the vaccine pair prevent people from contracting AIDS?