Andrew Brandt Pfizer Covid Adolescent Effects Vaccine Trial

Epidemiology is not high on the list of hobbies. But that’s for Andrew Brandt, a 13-year-old who lives in New Orleans and is enrolled in Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine trial for children.

“When the pandemic started, it was sad because I wanted to help people and I just felt like I really couldn’t do it,” Andrew told CNBC Make It.

Finding the Pfizer trial for his age group was a tangible way to approach and also suited his interest in science and medicine.

In early 2021, Andrew asked his mother if he could sign up for the trial. At the time, Pfizer’s Covid vaccine was already approved for emergency use in people older than 16, and the company recruited younger volunteers aged 12 to 15 years.

“Initially, it was scary” to decide whether he wanted to be subscribed or not, Christine Brandt, his mother, told CNBC Make It. “What does a parent look like, ‘Yes, use my child as a guinea pig?’

Andrew has done a lot of research on how mRNA vaccines work and the potential risks of being in a clinical trial. “I like to try a lot of things and learn everything I can,” he says.

After the family passed on its findings to his parents, the family consulted everyone, from his doctors to grandparents to family friends who are physicians before making the decision.

In early January, Andrew and his mother went to the Ochsner Medical Center for his first dose of vaccine or placebo.

“I was pretty calm because I was in the second phase, and they considered it safe,” Andrew says. “I knew it would not be the end of the world if I got sick.”

He was sent home with a paper disc used to measure any redness or swelling where he got the chance, as well as an app to keep track of his symptoms every day.

Although trial or research participants do not officially know if Andrew received the vaccine or a placebo (this is a double-blind trial), Andrew says he had a strong reaction after receiving the first injection. He says he had a fever, felt sore and tired and had pain around the injection site.

Within 36 hours, the symptoms “immediately subsided, as if a light switch had turned them off,” his mother said.

At school, Brandt’s friends and teachers (who have not yet been eligible for the vaccine) wanted to know about his experience.

“A lot of my friends just had a lot of questions because I mean, it’s not something we just know or learn a lot about,” Andrew says. As it turns out, one of his classmates was also in the trial.

Brandt’s peers were very curious about how the shot felt (how did he say it felt?), If he got sick and whether it was worth it or not, to which ‘I would definitely say yes’, he says.

On January 27, three weeks after his first shot, Andrew returns for his second.

With mf vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, the side effects tend to be more pronounced after the second dose than the first. This is due to the action of the two doses of vaccine: the first dose is intended to elicit an immune response, and the second dose builds on it.

After Andrew got his second shot, he had to rush to a football championship match. (His team won second place.)

The next morning Andrew says he has fever and swollen lymph nodes near the arm where he got the shot. His mother saw him lying face down on the floor, so he stayed home from school.

‘It was scary to have a fever; I did not know how long this thing would last, ‘he says. “I had a lot of muscle spasms, so I was basically in bed the rest of the day.”

At the end of March, Andrew’s mother can hear him coughing out of his bedroom, causing her to panic that something is wrong. According to the trial protocol, they had to immediately contact Pfizer and send a sample of a nasal swab to the hospital to test for Covid.

“It was like everyone running and frantically trying to get records in real time,” says Christine. Fortunately, the test came back negative.

Over the next two years, as part of the trial, Andrew will have his blood tested for SARS-Cov-2 antibodies. If a boost recording is needed in the future, he agreed to receive it from Pfizer as well.

“I always wanted to do something in epidemiology,” Andrew says.

When Andrew was 8, he said he “went down in a YouTube rabbit hole” and watched TED talks about the Ebola outbreak that took place from 2014 to 2016. In particular, he was inspired by an Iranian American doctor named dr. Pardis Sabeti, whose team was responsible for sequencing the genome of the Ebola virus.

Andrew found more YouTube videos outlining the history of infectious diseases and medicines, and became addicted and decided he wanted to become an epidemiologist.

“The most interesting thing for me is the way viruses work in the body,” he says. (Viruses make people sick by killing cells or disrupting cell function. The body targets the invader by getting an immune response, often through fever, white blood cells and antibodies.)

Andrew regards John Snow, the ‘father of epidemiology’ who pointed out the cause of the London cholera outbreak in the 1800s, as one of his inspirations.

Andrew goes to high school and hopes to further expand his medical knowledge by taking courses in biology, anatomy and physiology. Then he might investigate infectious diseases.

His personal experience with the trial only aroused his desire to follow medicine, in particular emergency medicine or trauma surgery.

“I think a good job at the university this weekend would be to be a paramedic,” he says.

Thanks to the trial that Andrew participated in with more than 2,000 other adolescents, Pfizer-BioNTech has data showing that the vaccine is 100% effective in adolescents aged 12 to 15 years.

The company submitted data to the Food and Drug Administration on March 31 to approve the emergency use authorization for the younger age group. Dr Anthony Fauci said the amendment was “imminent”, and the hope is that high school students can be vaccinated by early fall.

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