Achieving the Public Health Potential of COVID-19 Vaccines

Issues in Science and Technology is an award-winning quarterly journal published by Arizona State University and The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine devoted to the best writing on policy related to science, technology, and society.

On 18 November 2020 it published an article by Peter McGrat, IAP Health and IAP Science coordinator, Teresa Stoepler, IAP Policy Executive Director, Robin Fears, Biosciences Programme Director of the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC), Margaret A. Hamburg, co-chair of IAP Health and former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, and Volker ter Meulen, IAP president and former president of the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina.

Achieving the Public Health Potential of COVID-19 Vaccines highlights some of the main concerns that could undermine the public health value of the collective vaccine effort.

Authors stress the fact that

[t]he recent commitment by major commercial vaccine producers to maintain standards and follow tried-and-tested protocols—for example, by pausing trials while anomalous reactions among test subjects are investigated—is welcome, but must be accompanied by increasing transparency in disclosing data. Clinical trials must include appropriately diverse populations, including members of populations at risk who will ultimately need to receive the vaccine. In addition, conducting trials in many regions of the world is vital and can both help ensure vaccine assessment in those regions and help build capacity for ongoing and future clinical research studies

You can read the full article here.

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