NEW YORK (AP) – Lani Muller does not have to visit a doctor’s office to test an experimental COVID-19 vaccine – she just climbs into a blood-stained van parked in a busy street near her New York City neighborhood.
The US is rightly set on the chaotic deployment of the first two authorized vaccines to fight the pandemic. But with more vaccinations in the pipeline – critical to boosting global supplies – scientists are worried about whether enough volunteers will join in and stick to the necessary tests to prove they’re really working.
These studies, as in the past, should include color communities that have been hit hard by the pandemic, communities that also express concern about vaccination, in part because of a long history of racial differences in health care and even abuse of research. To help, researchers are setting up mobile health clinics in more than a dozen locations across the country to better reach minority participants and people in rural areas who would not otherwise be volunteering.
Muller, who is black, said her family was concerned about the vaccine research, so she did not say she entered to test AstraZeneca’s lap.
“The legacy of African Americans in science in these kinds of trials has not been great yet and we have not forgotten it,” said Muller, 49, an employee of Columbia University, whose participation in some previous research projects prepared her to get a test injection earlier this month.
Muller knows more than 20 people who got or died from COVID-19. “I am much more afraid of the disease than of the vaccination,” she said.
From the outset, the National Institutes of Health was adamant that COVID-19 vaccines should be tested in a population about as diverse as the country – the key to confidence in the survey that appears to be working. In studies of the Pfizer and Modern surveys used so far for widespread American use, 10% of the volunteers were black, and more were Spanish.
Diversity is now an even more difficult challenge. The high-risk volunteers needed for the final testing of other vaccine candidates must decide whether they want to stick with an experimental injection – one that could be a shot – or try to line up for a rationed but proven dose .
AstraZeneca, with about 30,000 volunteers so far, did not disclose specific numbers, but said the final weeks of enrollment focus on recruiting more minorities and people over the age of 65. Another manufacturer, Novavax, just started recruiting last month for its final testing.
The study of the vaccines in different populations is only one step to build trust, said dr. Wayne Frederick, president of Howard University, a historic black university in the country’s capital, said.
Howard’s hospital shared a video of Frederick and other health workers being vaccinated as a public announcement encouraging African Americans to get their own chance as soon as it’s their turn.
Frederick, a surgeon who is also at high risk for diabetes and sickle cell disease, said he was upset to receive emails alleging conspiracy theories, such as that vaccination is an experiment on African Americans. ‘
“There is misinformation that requires us all to be at the forefront of getting involved and challenging it,” he said.
But efforts to build confidence in the vaccines could be undermined if there is less stock to be left behind by less-affected minority communities.
“The stock issue is absolutely important,” said Stephaun Wallace, a scientist at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center, which is also part of the NIH-created COVID-19 prevention network that helps with vaccine research and education. “It’s important that we make sure the vaccine reaches the people, and that’s an access issue.”
The use of pickups to reach communities at risk has long been an important step in the fight against HIV, another disease that has hit black Americans excessively. And as more doses of the Pfizer and Modern COVID-19 vaccines arrive, mobile clinics are expected to help expand access to COVID-19 vaccination, especially in rural areas.
But the NIH program has a different focus and offers RV clinics from RV Matrix Medical Network to enhance the diversity of ongoing vaccine studies. Officials say they were used at a Lakota discussion, at chicken processing plants with a large number of Spanish staff and in cities like Washington where Howard University is recruiting volunteers for the new Novavax study.
“I do not think we can sit in the ivory towers and hope that people will come to us. I think it would be a mistake, “said Howard’s Frederick.
Researchers from the New York Blood Center regularly park their lab-on-wheels in parts of Queens and Brooklyn with large black, Asian, and Hispanic populations so that participants can finish even after the end of the study for the necessary investigations.
They also want to stand outside to answer questions from passers-by who are confused about COVID-19 vaccination in general.
It is ‘building trust and understanding’, said Dr Jorge Soler, who is helping to study the AstraZeneca vaccine as part of the Blood Center’s Project Achieve. ‘I’m Latino and I’m a scientist. Being able to tell people that means something. ”
Soler sometimes has to dispel the fears that it could be vaccinated to be ‘injected’ or to gather information for surveillance purposes.
He emphasizes that the Pfizer and Moderna shots currently in use cannot give the coronavirus to anyone – it is biologically impossible because it is not made with the actual virus.
And over and over again, people wonder how these vaccines appeared so quickly.
Simple explanation from Soler for how to speed up research without turning around? ‘This is what happens when the world is invested in something. You build a car faster with 20 people than two. ‘
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The Associated Press Health and Science Division receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.