A physician overseeing a clinical trial in Washington for Moderna's coronavirus vaccine has warned it will be impossible to tell how well it works without recruiting enough elderly and ethnic minority volunteers.
This is particularly crucial when it comes to COVID-19 -- a disease that kills black people and Latinos twice as often as whites, according to US federal data.Vaccine tracker: The top contenders to stop the novel coronavirus
It will involve 30,000 people and take at least two years to fully complete, though its developers have said they hope to have preliminary results that could win an emergency use authorization within months. Past medical research in the United States has been plagued by focusing on homogeneous populations, skewing results, despite federal guidelines to include diverse groups, he said.
Diemert added that, as a city with a 45 percent black population, Washington was an important site for investigation. One thing Diemert wants people to know: according to earlier trial stages, the vaccine causes less severe side-effects in the elderly compared to young people, possibly as a result of less robust immune systems among the old.
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