Vaccine Trials

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Anchor lead: Finding people who are willing to participate in vaccine clinical trials is becoming a problem, Elizabeth Tracey reports

While the two vaccines currently being administered in the US are reaching millions, several more are still in clinical trials to prove their efficacy, yet finding people willing to participate is getting harder and harder. Brian Garibaldi, a critical care medicine expert at Johns Hopkins, comments.

Garibaldi: If you were faced with the choice of waiting two months to potentially get one of the vaccines that we already know is 95% effective and seems to be safe, versus enrolling in a clinical trial right now, that’s a really difficult choice. Particularly if you’re in a position where you can potentially continue to self-isolate and keep yourself and your family protected from the infection. I think its pretty clear that while the two vaccines that we have are really, really good, we don’t have enough doses for everyone in our country, and we certainly don’t have enough doses for everyone in the world, so we are going to need other vaccines.  :30

Garibaldi notes that certain age groups, especially those 65 and older, are especially difficult to recruit at the moment as federal guidelines have placed them in eligible groups for vaccination. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.