Andrew Brandt Pfizer Covid Vaccine Study for Effects in Adolescents

Epidemiology isn’t high on your average teen’s hobbies list. But it’s for Andrew Brandt, a 13-year-old living in New Orleans and participating in Pfizer’s Covid-19 childhood vaccine study.

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

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

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

“At first it was agonizing” to decide whether or not to sign up, Christine Brandt, his mother, told CNBC Make It. “What kind of parent is like, ‘Yes, use my child as a guinea pig?'”

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

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

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

“I was pretty calm because I was on the second leg, so they almost certainly thought it was safe,” said Andrew. “I knew if I got sick it wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

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

While neither subjects nor researchers officially know whether Andrew received the vaccine or a placebo (it’s a double-blind trial), Andrew says he had a robust response after receiving the first injection. He says he had a fever, felt sore and fatigued, and had pain around the injection site.

Within 36 hours, the symptoms “disappeared immediately, as if they had been turned off by a light switch,” says his mother.

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

“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,” Andrew says. It turns out that one of his classmates was also in the process.

Brandt’s colleagues were most curious about how the shot felt (how did he feel it felt?), Whether 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 days after his first shot, Andrew returned for his second.

With the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, side effects are usually more pronounced after receiving the second dose than the first. This is because of the way the two-dose vaccines work: the first dose is designed to trigger an immune response and the second dose builds on that.

After getting his second chance, Andrew had to rush to a championship game. (His team won second place.)

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

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

In late March, Andrew’s mother heard him coughing from his bedroom, causing her to panic that something was wrong. The trial protocol required them to immediately contact Pfizer and send a nasal swab sample to the hospital to test for Covid.

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

Over the next two years, as part of the trial, Andrew will have his blood tested for SARS-Cov-2 antibodies. If booster shots are needed in the future, he has agreed to receive them from Pfizer as well.

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

When Andrew was 8, he said he “went down a YouTube rabbit hole” to watch TED Talks about the Ebola outbreak that took place from 2014 to 2016. He was particularly 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 explaining the history of infectious diseases and drugs and was addicted and decided he wanted to become an epidemiologist.

“The most interesting thing to 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 building an immune response, often through fever, white blood cells, and antibodies.)

Andrew cites John Snow, the “father of epidemiology” who identified the cause of the cholera outbreak in London in the 1800s as one of his sources of inspiration.

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

His personal experience with the trial has only fueled his desire to follow medications, especially emergency medicine or trauma surgery.

“I think becoming a paramedic is a good weekend job,” he says.

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

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

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