The Messenger by Peter Loftus

Author:Peter Loftus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

Hold On, Help Is on the Way

SHORTLY BEFORE 7 A.M. ON JULY 27, 2020, DAWN BAKER, a television news anchor in Savannah, Georgia, was in a patient room at a medical clinic. She was wearing a mask. She pulled her purple jacket off to expose her left shoulder so that a tech could slip a needle into her and plunge Moderna’s mRNA vaccine into her body.

Baker was the first person to receive Moderna’s vaccine in the large Phase 3 study. She was nervous but felt strongly about being part of the trial. “It’s really exciting to me that I could be a part of saving lives eventually, instead of just being scared and praying,” Baker told CNN.1

Baker was the first of what Moderna and federal officials hoped would be thirty thousand volunteers to get the vaccine or a saline solution, the placebo (Baker only learned later that she got the actual vaccine). They hoped that within a few months they’d have definitive evidence one way or the other if this experimental Covid-19 vaccine truly, and safely, worked.

“This is a significant milestone, and it comes at a remarkably rapid pace compared to the usual pace for vaccine preparation,” NIH Director Francis Collins said on a call with reporters a few hours after Baker received her dose in late July.

But Collins was careful to balance talk of speed with comments about safety, knowing the name Operation Warp Speed didn’t sit well with all, as it conjured up images of racing forward and corner-cutting in the minds of some. He said researchers would monitor safety “in the most rigorous way.”

Stéphane Bancel also was on the call, quick to point out that it was also a milestone for mRNA, the drug technology he had spent the last decade trying to move forward and which had finally reached a Phase 3 trial. “I think it’s an historic day for science as well,” he said.

Shortly before the study started, Moderna notched another $472 million from BARDA to fund the Phase 3 trial and late-stage clinical development of the vaccine, bringing Moderna’s total federal funding for the project to $955 million. Moderna said it needed the additional funding because the size of the trial, thirty thousand participants, was three times what it initially planned for.2

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That Dawn Baker was the first study subject to receive a dose also was significant because she is Black. The coronavirus was hurting certain communities of color—including Black, Latino, and Native American people—disproportionate to their shares of the overall population. The incidence of Covid hospitalizations among Blacks and Latinos was more than double that for non-Latino white people, and the incidence of deaths was double.3 They were at higher risk of exposure to the virus because they were more likely to live in crowded conditions or have jobs that couldn’t be performed remotely. Once infected, they were at higher risk of more severe illness, in part because of higher rates of chronic underlying medical conditions such as diabetes and obesity, as well as higher barriers to receiving medical care.

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