![]() ![]() Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, wrote to Salon. "Generally, people that have the disease you are trying to prevent are not included," Dr. As Lessler added, however, "These trials are usually limited to healthy adult volunteers, but the exact composition will depend on the disease and who is at most risk." Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health - scientists can move on to Phase II. If Phase I goes well - meaning that "the vaccine appears safe and the people who get it mount a detectable immune response," according to Dr. (The phases are sometimes referred to with Roman numerals, and sometimes with numbers research institutions don't seem particularly consistent here.) Then comes the first phase. In Phase I, a trial vaccine is administered to a small group of people for initial testing. Once that candidate exists, they produce a small number of trial vaccines. Before any phase begins, scientists work to develop a vaccine candidate. Here's a brief primer on what vaccine "phases" mean, and why it's important.īefore any vaccine candidate can be released to the public, it first has to go through several stages of study, which researchers organize into discrete phases. What exactly they mean is crucial for understanding what's going on. Yet given the urgency with which a vaccine will let our lives continue as normal, following the internecine twists and turns of vaccine production has suddenly become front-page news. And any similarities to the moon's phases are superficial: vaccine candidates don't wax and wane, per se. developed a spinal cord injury." A headline from Fierce Pharma proclaimed, "Moderna, now wrapped on phase 3 enrollment, touts diversity of vaccine trial participants."įor those who don't work in the pharmaceutical industry, understanding the different phases of a vaccine, and what that means, can be confusing. For instance, CNN reported earlier this month that Johnson & Johnson's coronavirus vaccine was "fourth to begin Phase 3 trials in the United States." NBC News reported earlier this week that "AstraZeneca's phase 3 clinical trial was put on hold in early September after a study participant in the U.K. Articles about the ongoing effort to create a vaccine for the novel coronavirus often include talk of "phases," as if vaccine production were akin to the moon. ![]()
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