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The unprecedented scientific quest to end the pandemic with a vaccine now faces one of its most crucial tests, and nothing less than the success of the entire endeavor is at stake. A vaccine must work for everyone — young and old; black, brown and white. To prove that it does, many of the 30,000 volunteers for each trial must come from diverse communities. It’s a scientific necessity, but also a moral imperative, as younger people of color die of coronavirus at twice the rate of white people, and black, Hispanic and Native Americans are hospitalized at four to five times the rate of white people in the same age groups.
“If this is a vaccine trial that enrolls a bunch of 20-somethings or white college graduates, it will not give us the information we need,” Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said in an interview....
The race to create a coronavirus vaccine has so far played out in the arcane domain of biology. Can the vaccine trigger the body’s immune system to protect against an infection? Which vaccine technology is more promising? How long do virus-fighting antibodies that are circulating in people’s blood stick around?
The definitive answers to those questions won’t come from laboratory experiments, but from large-scale human clinical tests that have long struggled to include minority communities....
