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NEW YORK (AP) – Lani Muller doesn’t have to go to a doctor to test an investigational COVID-19 vaccine – she just gets into a snowmobile-like van that parks on a busy street near her New York neighborhood York.
The United States is rightly fixated on the chaotic rollout of the first two vaccines licensed to fight the pandemic. But with more vaccines in the works – essential for increasing global supplies – scientists are wondering if enough volunteers will join in and stick to the tests needed to prove if they really work, too.
These studies, like previous ones, must include communities of color that have been hit hard by the pandemic, communities that also say they are concerned about the vaccination campaign in part because of a long history of racial disparities in care. health and even research abuse. To help, researchers in more than a dozen locations across the country are deploying mobile health clinics to better reach out to minority participants and people living in rural areas who would otherwise not volunteer.
Muller, who is Black, said her family were concerned about vaccine research, so they didn’t mention that they had signed up to test AstraZeneca’s vaccine.
“The legacy of African Americans in science in these kinds of trials has not been great and we haven’t forgotten,” said Muller, 49, a Columbia University employee whose participation in some previous research projects prompted her to get tested. earlier this month.
Muller knows more than 20 people who have contracted or died from COVID-19. “I’m much more afraid of the disease than of the vaccine trial,” she says.
From the start, the National Institutes of Health insisted that COVID-19 vaccines be tested in a population about as diverse as that of the country – the key to building confidence in vaccines that have been shown to be effective. In studies of Pfizer and Moderna injections so far approved for widespread use in the United States, 10% of the volunteers were black and more were Hispanic.
Diversity is an even more difficult challenge now. The high-risk volunteers needed for the final testing of other vaccine candidates must decide whether they want to stick with an experimental injection – an injection that could be a dummy injection – or try to queue for a rationed dose but proven.
AstraZeneca, with around 30,000 volunteers to date, has not released specific figures, but said the last few weeks of enrollment focus on recruiting more minorities and people over 65. Another manufacturer, Novavax, just started recruiting for its latest tests last month.
Studying vaccines in diverse populations is just one step in 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 workers getting vaccinated as part of a public service announcement encouraging African Americans to get vaccinated 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 appalled to receive emails espousing conspiracy theories such as vaccination is “an experiment on African Americans.”
“There is misinformation that forces us all to be at the forefront to get involved and challenge it,” he said.
But efforts to build confidence in vaccines could be undermined if, once more supplies are available, hard-hit minority communities find themselves left behind.
“The issue of fairness is absolutely important,” said Stephaun Wallace, a scientist at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center who is also part of the COVID-19 prevention network created by the NIH that assists in vaccine research and education. “It’s important that we make sure the vaccine gets to people, and it’s an access issue.
Using vans to reach at-risk communities has long been a staple in the fight against HIV, another disease that has disproportionately plagued black Americans. And as more doses of the Pfizer and Moderna 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, offering the Matrix Medical Network’s RV-sized mobile clinics to help improve the diversity of ongoing vaccine studies. Officials say they were used on a Lakota reservation, in chicken processing plants with a predominantly 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 in the ivory towers and expect people to come to us. I think that would be a mistake, ”said Howard’s Frederick.
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 study enrollment ends, participants can present themselves for the necessary examinations.
They also make a point of standing outside to answer questions from confused passers-by about the COVID-19 vaccination in general.
It’s about “building trust and relationships,” said Dr Jorge Soler, who is helping study the AstraZeneca vaccine as part of the Blood Center’s Achieve project. “I’m Latino and I’m a scientist. Being able to tell people this means something. ”
Soler sometimes needs to allay fears that getting the vaccine means being ‘injected with a microchip’ or having information collected for surveillance purposes.
He points out that the Pfizer and Moderna injections currently in use cannot give someone the coronavirus – this is biologically impossible because none are made with the actual virus.
And again and again people wonder 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 is invested in something. You build a car faster with 20 people than with two. “
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The Associated Press’s Department of Health and Science receives support from the Department of Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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