An even partially effective HIV vaccine could be key to beating the global pandemic, especially when combined with HIV treatment as prevention. UNAIDS has called on nations to get 73 percent of those living with HIV virally suppressed by 2020. Currently, only an estimated 31 percent of the world’s HIV population has hit this mark, thus ensuring they have an extremely low, and possibly nonexistent, risk of passing on the virus. Given the status quo, an estimated 49 million new people will contract the virus worldwide by 2035. Getting 86 percent of the world’s HIV population virally suppressed by 2030 would avert an estimated 25 million of these new infections. If starting in 2020, a vaccine that cut the infection risk in half were gradually scaled up to cover 70 percent of the population, this would avert an estimated additional 6.3 million new infections. The study did not address the potential benefit of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).