Wafaa El-Sadr, MD, MPH, MPA, global director of ICAP at Columbia University, spoke to Al Jazeera on July 20 about the experimental coronavirus vaccine developed by scientists at Oxford University, which has been shown in an early trial to prompt a protective immune response in hundreds of people who got the shot:
“This is very exciting news, encouraging news, that we now have another vaccine that is poised to move into phase three studies, which are the definitive studies that will tell us if the vaccine works, and if it is safe in large numbers of participants. […] We have to be very cautious because while this phase one-two study was done in a little more than a thousand participants, sometimes you need to study a vaccine in a much larger population in order to see rare side effects. I think it’s important for us to move ahead to larger studies that will recruit maybe 30,000 individuals, and hope that some rare side effect does not manifest itself once you’re using it in a larger population.”
Watch the segment on the Al Jazeera website
Read the latest ICAP updates on COVID-19 here
