Researchers are furiously working to create an effective vaccine against COVID-19.
Top immunologists are hopeful that pharmaceutical companies can make a vaccine by the end of the year, but it will likely take months or even years to produce enough to protect billions of people across the globe.
So the obvious question is: Who gets the vaccine first?
“Not everybody’s going to like the answer,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, recently told one of the advisory groups the government asked to help decide, The Associated Press reports. “There will be many people who feel that they should have been at the top of the list.”
It makes sense that health workers and those on the front lines of treating the infected would be first on the list. Then, those most vulnerable — people above 60 years old and those with other health ailments — would likely come next.
The largest COVID-19 vaccine study in the world began last week, with the first of 30,000 Americans volunteering to take the shots. The experimental vaccine, developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Moderna Inc., is in phase three of the development process, which includes tests at clinical sites across the country.
“Having a safe and effective vaccine distributed by the end of 2020 is a stretch goal, but it’s the right goal for the American people,” Collins said in a statement. “The launch of this phase-3 trial in record time while maintaining the most stringent safety measures demonstrates American ingenuity at its best and what can be done when stakeholders come together with unassailable objectivity toward a common goal.”
The trial is expected to enroll approximately 30,000 adult volunteers who do not have COVID-19.
The vaccine efficacy trial is the first to be implemented under Operation Warp Speed, a multi-agency collaboration created by President Donald Trump and led by the Health and Human Services Department that aims to accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of medical countermeasures for COVID-19, NIH said.
“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and the hard work of American scientists, the investigational vaccine developed by NIH and Moderna has reached this Phase 3 trial at record pace,” said HHS Secretary Alex Azar. “Operation Warp Speed is supporting a portfolio of vaccines like the NIH/Moderna candidate so that, if the results of clinical trials meet FDA’s gold standard, these products can reach Americans without a day’s delay.”
During the trial, volunteers will receive two intramuscular injections about 28 days apart. Participants will be randomly assigned 1:1 to receive either two 100 microgram (mcg) injections of mRNA-1273 or two shots of a saline placebo. The trial is blinded, so the investigators and the participants will not know who is assigned to which group.
Trump spoke optimistically of the prospects for a vaccine during a visit to a biotech facility in North Carolina on Monday, despite experts cautioning one may not be widely available for another year.
“We are way ahead on vaccines, way ahead on therapeutics. And when we have it, we’re all set up with our platforms to deliver them very, very quickly,” Trump said during a White House press conference on Thursday. “We’re all set to deliver them as soon as we have them, and that’s going to be very soon.”