A recent paper by Feldman et al. reporting a young man who attempted to commit suicide caught my attention. It read:
“Our team became aware of the possibility of false positive HIV tests (all but HIV PCR) in individuals vaccinated against Sars-CoV-2 when a laboratory technician attempted suicide. The reason: five months after his second vaccination against Sars-CoV-2 (being negative for Sars-CoV-2 nucleocapsid antibodies at all times) his HIV antibody tests as well as the usual confirmatory HIV tests yielded positive results. Only multiple controls by means of PCR in various centers of competence showed that the human HIV-virus (all HIV subtypes) was and is not detectable in this patient. After such cases became more frequent in our international network, we asked for documentation and reporting. Result: there seems to be a genuine effect, although rather small in magnitude. However, when it comes to HIV and the associated consequences, each individual case is worth taking a closer look at.”An Australian vaccine trial was abandoned in 2020 because of a high number of participants turning HIV false positive. “Australia had previously agreed to buy 51 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Australian firm CSL and the University of Queensland,” the BBC reported.
Now cases of HIV false positive testing are coming in for both patients who had SARS-CoV-2 infection and some who had COVID-19 vaccination. Gudipati et al. from Henry Ford did a search in their data system among 39,110 records and found 87 false positive HIV results distributed across patients who had COVID-19, vaccination, and presumably both. However, the study mostly focused on the link between false positives and COVID infection.
