A handful of the first SARS vaccines “worked” (in that they led to antibody production), but also had nasty side effects.

It's like how there's a cure for HIV that you really don't want.

You mean death? Or am I missing something?

I would assume they mean the CCR5 stem cell/bone marrow thing.

A handful of patients (2?) have undetectable viral loads after being treated for leukemia. In these cases, the bone marrow or stem cells were from donors with a mutation in CCR5 that confers some resistance to HIV. The mechanism isn't completely understood, AFAIK, since people with the CCR5 delta32 mutation have partial, but not complete, resistance to HIV normally.

It's not a very viable treatment yet: the transplant procedure is brutal (a friend went through it) and you need to be unlucky enough to need a transplant, yet lucky enough to find a donor that has the right mutations (which again, are not completely known) AND is otherwise compatible with the patient.

Still, very exciting for a possible mechanism, but also probably not coming to a hospital near you this decade.

Here's one of the studies: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa0802905