NEW YORK (AP) – Lani Muller doesn’t need to visit a doctor’s office to help test an experimental COVID-19 vaccine – she just gets into a bloodmobile-like van that parks on a busy street near her New York neighborhood.
The United States is rightly obsessed with the chaotic launch of the first two vaccines authorized to fight the pandemic. But with more vaccines on the way – essential to boosting global supplies – scientists worry whether enough volunteers will join and stick to the tests needed to prove they work too.
These studies, like previous ones, should include communities of color that have been hard hit by the pandemic, communities that also express concern about the vaccination campaign in part because of a long history of racial health disparities and even research abuse. To help, researchers at more than a dozen locations across the country are setting up mobile health clinics to better reach participants from minorities and people in rural areas who would otherwise not be volunteers.
Muller, who is black, said his family was concerned about vaccine research, so she did not mention that she signed up to test the AstraZeneca vaccine.
“The legacy of African Americans in science in this type of testing was not great and we have not forgotten,” said Muller, 49, a Columbia University employee whose participation in some previous research projects made her want to get a test shot early. Of this month.
Muller knows more than 20 people who obtained or died from COVID-19. “I am much more afraid of the disease than of the vaccine trial,” she said.
From the beginning, the National Institutes of Health was adamant that COVID-19 vaccines be tested in a population as diverse as that of the country – the key to building confidence in any vaccine that works. In studies of Pfizer and Moderna photos so far released for widespread use in the United States, 10% of the volunteers were black and more Hispanic.
Diversity is an even more difficult challenge now. The high-risk volunteers needed for the final test of other vaccine candidates must decide whether to maintain an experimental injection – one that can be a dummy injection – or try to get in line for a rationed, but proven dose.
AstraZeneca, with about 30,000 volunteers so far, has not released specific figures, but said the last few weeks of enrollment are focusing on recruiting more minorities and people over 65. Another manufacturer, Novavax, started recruiting for its final test last month.
Studying vaccines in diverse populations is just one step towards building trust, said Dr. Wayne Frederick, president of Howard University, a historically black university in the nation’s capital.
Howard’s hospital shared a video of Frederick and other health professionals being vaccinated as a public service announcement encouraging African Americans to get their own vaccines as soon as it is their turn.
Frederick, a surgeon who is also at high risk for diabetes and sickle cell disease, said he was dismayed to receive emails defending conspiracy theories, such as that vaccination is “an experiment with African Americans.”
“There is misinformation that requires all of us to be on the front lines to engage and challenge,” he said.
But efforts to increase confidence in vaccines can be undermined if, when more supplies are available, hard-hit minority communities are left behind.
“The equity issue is absolutely important,” said Stephaun Wallace, a scientist at Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center who is also part of the COVID-19 Prevention Network created by the NIH that helps with vaccine research and education. “It is important to ensure that the vaccine reaches people and that is a matter of access.”
The use of vans to reach communities at risk for a long time is one of the main methods of combating HIV, another disease that disproportionately affects black Americans. And as more doses of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines arrive, mobile clinics should help expand access to the COVID-19 vaccination, especially in rural areas.
But the NIH program has a different focus, offering mobile clinics the size of RVs from the Matrix Medical Network to help improve the diversity of ongoing vaccine studies. Officials say they were used on a Lakota reservation, in chicken processing plants with a largely Hispanic workforce, and in cities like Washington, where Howard University is recruiting volunteers for the new Novavax study.
“I don’t think we can sit on the ivory towers and wait for people to come to us. I think it would be a mistake, ”said Frederick de Howard.
Researchers at 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 even after completing the study enrollment, participants can attend for the necessary check-ups.
They also make it a point to stay outside to answer questions from confused passersby about the COVID-19 vaccination in general.
It is “building trust and relationship,” said Dr. Jorge Soler, who helps study the AstraZeneca vaccine as part of the blood center’s Achieve Project. “I am Latin and I am a scientist. Being able to tell people that means something. ”
Soler sometimes has to dispel fears that being vaccinated could mean being “injected with a chip” or having information collected for surveillance purposes.
He emphasizes that the Pfizer and Moderna injections now used cannot provide the coronavirus to anyone – this is biologically impossible, as neither is done with the real virus.
And repeatedly, people wonder how these vaccines came about so quickly.
Soler’s simple explanation of how to speed up your search without cutting shortcuts? “It 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 Department of Health and Science receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.