Andrew Brandt Pfizer Covid vaccine trial for effects in adolescents

Epidemiology does not rank high on your average teen’s hobby list. But it’s for Andrew Brandt, a 13-year-old who lives in New Orleans and is enrolled in a trial of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for children.

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

Finding the Pfizer trial for their age group felt like a tangible way to get involved and also suited their interest in science and medicine.

In early 2021, Andrew asked his mother if he could enroll in the trial. At the time, Pfizer’s Covid vaccine had already been approved for emergency use in people over the age of 16 and the company was recruiting younger volunteers aged 12 to 15.

“Initially, it was an agony” to decide whether or not to let him enroll, Christine Brandt, his mother, tells CNBC Make It. “What kind of parents are,‘ Yeah, do you use my son as a guinea pig? “

Andrew had 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 passing on their findings to their parents, the family consulted with everyone, from their doctors to grandparents and family friends who are doctors before making the decision.

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

“He was pretty quiet because he was in the second stage, so they almost certainly considered him safe,” Andrew says. “I knew that if I got sick, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

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

Although neither participants nor trial researchers officially know whether Andrew received the vaccine or a placebo (it is a double-blind trial), Andrew says he had a solid response after receiving the first injection. He says he had a fever, felt sore and tired and had pain at the injection site.

At 36 hours, the symptoms “instantly subsided, as if a light switch had turned them off,” her mother says.

At school, Brandt’s friends and teachers (who were not yet 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 a lot about or teach,” Andrew says. It turns out that one of his teammates was also on trial.

Brandt’s teammates were the most curious about how the shot felt (how did he say he felt?), Whether he got sick and whether it was worth it or not, to which he “would definitely say yes,” he says.

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

With Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, side effects tend to be more pronounced after getting the second dose than the first. This is due to the operation of two-dose vaccines: the first dose is intended to trigger an immune response and the second dose is based on it.

After getting his second shot, Andrew had to hurry to a football championship game. (His team won second place.)

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

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

Then, in late March, Andrew’s mother could hear him coughing from his bedroom, which made him panic that something was wrong. According to the test protocol, they had to contact Pfizer immediately and send a sample of a nasal swab to the hospital to do the Covid test.

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

For the next two years, as part of the trial, Andrew will be tested for blood to detect SARS-Cov-2 antibodies. If reinforcement shots are needed in the future, you also agree to receive them from Pfizer.

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

When Andrew was 8, he said he “went down a YouTube rabbit hole” watching 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 Ebola virus genome.

Andrew found more YouTube videos telling the story of infectious diseases and medicine and got hooked and decided he wanted to become an epidemiologist.

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

Andrew regards John Snow, the “father of epidemiology” who pointed to the cause of the London cholera outbreak in the 1800s, as one of his inspirations.

Going to high school, Andrew hopes to continue expanding his medical knowledge by taking classes in biology, anatomy and physiology. Then you may investigate infectious diseases.

His personal experience with the trial has only fueled his desire to pursue medicine, particularly emergency medicine or trauma surgery.

“I think a good college job weekend job would be to be a paramedic,” he says.

Now, thanks to the trial in which Andrew participated along with more than 2,000 other teens, Pfizer-BioNTech has data showing that the vaccine is 100% effective in teens ages 12 to 15.

The company sent data to the Food and Drug Administration on March 31 for approval of its emergency use authorization for the younger age group. Dr. Anthony Fauci said the amendment is “imminent” and the hope is that high school students can be vaccinated in early fall.

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