Social and Behavioral Challenges of HIV Vaccines: Implications for Social Work and Social Science

Abstract

A safe and efficacious HIV vaccine would be a tremendous asset to halting the spread of HIV. Nevertheless, HIV vaccines face a range of social and behavioral challenges that will determine their ultimate contribution to prevention. HIV vaccine development and clinical trials raise thorny social, behavioral, and ethical issues around resource allocation, recruitment and enrollment, trial implementation, and post-trial follow-up and access to services. Furthermore, the success of future HIV vaccines is contingent on access and acceptability. Involvement of social work and social service providers and engagement of social science research across the continuum of HIV vaccine development and dissemination are central to successful community engagement and advocacy, mitigation of social harms of clinical trials, support for fair and ethical conduct of trials, acceptability and access to future vaccines, and integration of HIV vaccines with behavioral HIV prevention.

KEYWORDS:

• AIDS
• clinical trials
• community engagement
• false positive reactions
• HIV
• HIV vaccines
• research participation
• risk behavior
• social work

This work was supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario HIV Treatment Network, and the Canada Research Chairs Program. Thanks are given to anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.