A healthy competition is emerging for researchers looking to sign up vaccine test subjects as the U.S. looks to complete late-stage vaccine trials amid the global coronavirus pandemic.
The efforts are widespread, looking for healthy individuals to get the shots to prove they work on a large scale, particularly in places where the virus cases are rising, according to The Wall Street Journal.
There are over 120,000 test subjects needed, according to the Journal.
"We not only have to find the number of volunteers, but they need to be in an area where the virus is currently spreading, otherwise you learn nothing about the effectiveness of the vaccine," National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins told the Journal.
"It is a big task, and it means pulling together all of the clinical trial capacity that we can."
Researchers are even recruiting at pharmacies and enlisting churches in search for subjects, as the U.S. is attempting to produce a vaccine in record time, per the report.
"One volunteer cannot be in two different studies; it's a zero-sum game in that regard," Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc. CEO Dr. Joseph Kim told the paper.
The U.S. government is funding three 30,000-person trials this summer, per the report:
- Moderna Inc.'s vaccine starting this month.
- University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC's in August (which has already began outside the U.S.).
- Johnson & Johnson's in September.
Pfizer Inc. and partner BioNTech SE plan has its own 30,000-person vaccine trial underway this month, too, per the Journal.
"It really is a major project beyond the scope of anything I've done before," NYU Langone Health's Vaccine Center Director Mark Mulligan told the Journal.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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