NIH chief offers vaccine assurance
Dr. Francis Collins offers assurance to Senate panel that National Institutes of Health will put safety first.
WASHINGTON — The suspension of a COVID-19 vaccine study over an illness in a single participant shows there will be “no compromises” on safety in the race to develop the shot, the chief of the National Institutes of Health told Congress on Wednesday.
AstraZeneca has put on hold studies of its vaccine candidate in the U.S. and other countries while it investigates whether a British volunteer’s illness is a side effect or a coincidence.
“This ought to be reassuring,” NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said before a Senate committee. “When we say we are going to focus first on safety and make no compromises, here is Exhibit A of how that is happening in practice.”
Scientists have been scrambling to develop a vaccine against the coronavirus since the outbreak
began, and the U.S. has launched the world’s largest studies — final-stage testing of three leading candidates, with three more trials set to come soon that will each recruit 30,000 test subjects.
Public health experts are worried President Donald Trump will pressure the Food and Drug Administration to approve a vaccine before it is proven to be safe
and effective, a concerned senator after senator echoed on Wednesday.
“When it comes to a COVID-19 vaccine, we can’t allow President Trump to repeat his alarming pattern of putting politics ahead of science and public health,” said Sen. Patty Murray, DWash.
The U.S. has invested billions of dollars in efforts to quickly develop multiple vaccines against COVID-19. But public fears that a vaccine is unsafe or ineffective could be disastrous, derailing the effort to vaccinate millions of Americans.
Collins said the public needs to understand the process behind telling when any vaccine candidate is ready for widespread use — one that by design is keeping both manufacturers and politicians in the dark until the evidence jells.
About 150 COVID-19 infections in a study of 30,000 people should be enough to tell if that candidate really is working — and an independent group of experts, not the FDA, gets to do the counting.
Every vaccine trial is overseen by a “data and safety monitoring board,” or DSMB. These boards include scientists and statisticians who are experts in their fields but have no ties to either the government or the vaccine-makers.
The top priority: watching for safety concerns, like the one that sparked a DSMB in Britain to pause AstraZeneca’s vaccinations and alert its U.S. counterpart.
But this is the group that also will decide when each vaccine is ready to be evaluated by regulators.
In each 30,000-person study, about half the participants are given the real vaccine and half get dummy shots, and neither they nor their doctors know which is which. Only the DSMB has the power to unlock the code of who got which shot and peek at how the volunteers are faring before a study is finished.
The FDA can’t begin to consider approving a vaccine until the DSMB says the data is good enough for that debate, Collins stressed. Once that happens, the FDA has pledged to bring each candidate before a public vaccine advisory committee.
The FDA already has told manufacturers it won’t consider any vaccine that’s less than 50% effective.
“If your vaccine is at least 50% effective, you’re going to know it because you’re going to see a big skewing” of infections, Collins said. “You count those events and you know whether it worked or not.”
Getting the right math before November, as Trump has promised, is “incredibly unlikely,” said Dr. Larry Corey of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute, who is overseeing the U.S. government’s vaccine studies.
Collins expressed “cautious optimism” that one of the vaccines being tested will pan out by the end of the year but warned that trying “to predict whether it happens on a particular week before or after a particular date in early November is well beyond anything that any scientist right now could tell you.”