NEW YORK (AP) – Lani Muller does not have to visit a doctor’s office to help test a COVID-19 experimental vaccine, but only gets into a cell phone-like van parked on a busy street near her neighborhood of New York City.
The United States is rightly set on the chaotic launch of the first two vaccines authorized to fight the pandemic. But with more vaccines in the pipeline, key to increasing global supplies, scientists are worried about getting enough volunteers to join and stick to the tests needed to show if they really work, too.
These studies, like the previous ones, should include communities of color that have been hard hit by the pandemic, communities that are also concerned about the impetus for vaccination in part because of a long history of health disparities. racial and even abuse in investigations. To help, researchers from more than a dozen locations across the country are deploying mobile health clinics to better reach minority participants and people in rural areas who might not otherwise be able to volunteer.
Muller, who is black, said her family was concerned about the vaccine investigation, so she did not mention that she had signed up to test AstraZeneca’s shot.
“The legacy of African Americans in science in this type of essay has not been great and we have not forgotten it,” said Muller, 49, an employee of Columbia University, whose involvement in some research projects previous made her willing to get a test injection. earlier this month.
Woman knows more than 20 people who have suffered or died from COVID-19. “I’m a lot more scared of the disease than the vaccine trial,” he said.
From the outset, the National Institutes of Health was adamant that COVID-19 vaccines be provided in a population as diverse as the country’s, key to building confidence in the features that would work. In studies on Pfizer and Moderna shots so far deleted for widespread use in the United States, 10% of volunteers were black and more were Hispanic.
Diversity is now an even tougher challenge. High-risk volunteers needed for the final tests of other vaccine candidates must decide whether they want to stick with an experimental injection (one that could be a fictitious test) or try to line up to get a dose. rationed but proven.
AstraZeneca, with about 30,000 volunteers so far, did not publish specific figures, but said the last weeks of enrollment focus on recruiting more minorities and people over 65. Another manufacturer, Novavax, has just started hiring for its final test last month.
Studying vaccines in various populations is just one step in building trust, said Dr. Wayne Frederick, president of Howard University, a historically black university in the country’s capital.
Howard Hospital shared a video of how Frederick and other health care workers were vaccinated as a public service announcement encouraging African Americans to receive their own shot as soon as it was their turn.
Frederick, a surgeon who is also at high risk due to diabetes and sickle cell disease, said he is dismayed to receive emails defending 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 participating and challenging it,” he said.
But efforts to build confidence in vaccines could be undermined if, once there is more supply, the affected minority communities are left behind.
“The issue of equity is absolutely important,” said Stephaun Wallace, a scientist at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center that is also part of the COVID-19 prevention network created by NIH that helps research and education. vaccines. “It’s important that we make sure the vaccine reaches people, and that’s an access issue.”
The use of vans to reach at-risk communities has long been a staple of the fight against HIV, another disease that has disproportionately affected black Americans. And as more doses arrive from Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, mobile clinics are expected to help expand access to COVID-19 vaccination, especially in rural areas.
But the NIH program has a different approach, as it offers Matrix Medical Network’s RV-sized mobile clinics to help improve the diversity of ongoing vaccine studies. Officials say they have been used on a Lakota reservation, in chicken processing plants with Hispanic workforce, and in cities like Washington, where Howard University is recruiting volunteers for the new Novavax studio.
“I don’t think we can sit in the ivory towers and I hope people come to us. I think it would be a mistake, “Frederick de Howard said.
Researchers at the New York Blood Center regularly park their labs on wheels in areas of Queens and Brooklyn with large populations of blacks, Asians, and Hispanics, so that even after enrolling in the study, participants can attend. to the necessary revisions.
They are also trying to be outside to answer questions from confused passers-by about COVID-19 vaccination in general.
It’s “generating trust and relationship,” said Dr. Jorge Soler, who helps study the AstraZeneca vaccine as part of the Blood Center Achieve Project. “I am Latin and I am a scientist. Knowing how to say this to people means something. ”
Sometimes, Soler has to dispel fears that getting vaccinated could mean “injecting a chip” or gathering information for surveillance purposes.
He points out that the features of Pfizer and Moderna in use now cannot give someone the coronavirus, this is biologically impossible, as it is not done with the real virus either.
And again and again, people are wondering how these vaccines came about so quickly.
Soler’s simple explanation of how to speed up research without cutting corners? “This is what happens when the world invests in something. You build a car faster with 20 people than with two. “
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.