10:26 p.m. ET, October 22, 2020
Vaccine advisers urge FDA to encourage diversity in Covid-19 vaccine trials
From CNN Health’s Maggie Fox and Elizabeth Cohen
A sign for the Food And Drug Administration is seen outside of the agency's headquarters in White Oak, Maryland, on July 20.
Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images
Vaccine advisers are urging the US Food and Drug Administration to do as much as possible to encourage pharmaceutical companies to enroll diverse populations in their clinical trials of experimental coronavirus vaccines.
Diversity is needed to make sure the vaccine works in the groups hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic, and to ensure that those groups trust the vaccine enough to get it once one or more are available, members of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee said at the group’s first meeting to discuss a potential Covid-19 vaccine.
Dr. Luigi Notarangelo, chief of the Laboratory of Clinical Immunology And Microbiology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Black Americans already have a strong distrust of vaccines and drug companies. If minorities don’t enroll in vaccine trials in enough numbers, “their trust will diminish even further,” Notarangelo said.
“Perhaps the White population will be protected and we will only see severe cases of Covid among the Blacks, which would be a total disaster from a social standpoint,” he said.
“I don’t know what could be done but something should be done to facilitate inclusion of a vulnerable population, in this case, the Black population.”
NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that about 37% of the volunteers in coronavirus vaccine clinical trials should be Latino, and 27% be Black.
Vaccine maker Moderna said Thursday it has enrolled 30,000 volunteers in its coronavirus vaccine trial and says 20% of them are Latino and 10% are Black.
Vaccines and medicines can work differently in different racial and ethnic groups, so diversity in clinical trials is important.
Black people are 2.6 times more likely to get Covid-19 than White people, and Latinos are 2.8 times more likely to get Covid-19 than White people, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.