After 20 million deaths over 20 years, the HIV virus that produces AIDS has proven remarkably resistant to a preventative vaccine. Currently there’s only one AIDS vaccine candidate undergoing testing, and even it is only effective against some, not all, strains of HIV. This vaccine has been tested on 5400 people in North America and Europe in double blind studies where neither the doctors not the test subjects knew whether they were getting an injection of the true experimental AIDSVAX vaccine or just a placebo of sterile water. Now the trial is over and the project records – a stack of paper as tall as the Statue of Liberty – has been sequestered from the doctors performing the study. These papers are in the hands of independent mathematicians who will distill numerical results out of the raw data. HIV infection rates among the vaccine recipients will have to be at least 30 per cent lower than the control unvaccinated group for the vaccine to be considered even marginally successful. Similar statistics are to be calculated later in 2003 from data on 2500 test subjects currently being tested in Thailand. Further information on this project may be obtained from two authoritative sites, AIDScience and the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC).