NEW YORK (AP) – Lani Muller doesn’t need to visit a doctor’s office to help test an experimental COVID-19 vaccine – she just climbs into a bloodmobile-like van that parks on a busy street near her New York neighborhood City.
The US is rightly fixated on the chaotic roll-out of the first two approved vaccines to fight the pandemic. But with more vaccines in the pipeline – critical to boosting global supplies – scientists are concerned whether enough volunteers will get involved and adhere to the tests needed to prove whether they, too, really work.
Those studies, like previous ones, must include communities of color badly affected by the pandemic, communities also voicing concerns about vaccination urge, in part because of a long history of racial health inequalities and even research misuse. To help, researchers in more than a dozen places around the country are rolling out mobile health clinics to better reach minority participants and those in rural areas who might not otherwise volunteer.
Muller, who is Black, said her family was concerned about the vaccine research, so she didn’t say she signed up to test the AstraZeneca injection.
“The legacy of African Americans in science in these types of studies has not been great and we have not forgotten it,” said Muller, 49, a Columbia University employee who through participating in a number of previous research projects has prepared her to give her a Test injection. earlier this month.
Muller knows more than 20 people who have died or died from COVID-19. “I’m much more afraid of the disease than the vaccination trial,” she said.
From the outset, the National Institutes of Health have been adamant that COVID-19 vaccines are being tested in a population about as diverse as that of the nation – the key to building confidence in any shots turned out to work. In studies of the Pfizer and Moderna shots approved for widespread use in the US so far, 10% of the volunteers were black, and more were Hispanic.
Diversity is now an even more difficult challenge. The high-risk volunteers needed for the latest tests of other vaccine candidates must decide whether to stick with an experimental injection – one that might be a fake injection – or try to line up for a rationed but proven dose.
AstraZeneca, with about 30,000 volunteers so far, has not released any specific numbers, but said the last weeks of enrollment will focus on recruiting more minorities and people over the age of 65. Another maker, Novavax, has just started recruiting for its last test last month.
Studying vaccines in different populations is just one step in building confidence, 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 take their own photo as soon as it is their turn.
Frederick, a surgeon who is also at high risk for diabetes and sickle cell disease, said he is appalled to receive emails quoting conspiracy theories, such as that vaccination is “an experiment on African Americans.”
“There is misinformation that requires us all to be at the forefront to participate and challenge it,” he said.
But efforts to build confidence in the vaccines could be undermined if, once more supply becomes available, the hard-hit minority communities lag behind.
“The issue of equality is absolutely important,” said Stephaun Wallace, a scientist at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center who is also part of the NIH-founded COVID-19 Prevention Network that aids vaccine research and education. “It’s important that we get the vaccine to people, and that’s an access problem.”
Using vans to reach at-risk communities has long been an important part of the fight against HIV, another disease that has affected a disproportionate number of 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 vaccinations, especially in rural areas.
But the NIH program has a different focus, offering Matrix Medical Network RV-sized mobile clinics to help enhance the diversity of ongoing vaccine trials. Officials say they have been used on a Lakota sanctuary, at chicken processing plants with a largely Spanish 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 hope people will come to us. I think that would be a mistake, ”said Frederick of 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 study enrollment ends, participants can stop by for the required checkups.
They also make it a point to stand outside to answer questions from passersby who are confused about COVID-19 vaccination in general.
It “builds trust and rapport,” said Dr. Jorge Soler, who is helping study the AstraZeneca vaccine as part of the blood center’s Project Achieve. ‘I am Latino and I am a scientist. Saying that to people means something. ”
Soler sometimes needs to allay fears that vaccination could mean being ‘injected with a chip’ or gathering information for surveillance purposes.
He emphasizes that the images from Pfizer and Moderna now in use cannot give anyone the coronavirus – that’s biologically impossible because neither is made with the actual virus.
And again and again people wonder how these vaccines appeared so quickly.
Soler’s simple explanation for speeding up research without cornering? “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 Department of Health and Science is supported by the Science Education Department of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.