Vaccine clinical trial in Plano seeking volunteers

PLANO, TX – A Phase 3 clinical trial as part of Operation Warp Speed will be conducted at Research Your Health in Plano, and the clinic is currently seeking volunteers.

Researchers are looking to enroll 30,000 patients for NVX-CoV2373, a protein-based vaccine developed by Maryland-based pharmaceutical company Novavax. Researchers from the New England Journal of Medicine found in early clinical trials that the vaccine produced a high level of antibodies in rodents and other animal subjects without resulting in serious adverse events.

“This virus knows no boundaries,” said Dr. Jeffrey Adelglass, President of Research Your Health, in a statement. “Wealth, position, race or ethnicity… it attacks equally – and in some communities – rather disproportionately.”

The clinic is looking for subjects in high-risk vocations such as health care and delivery, as well as patients who live or work with elderly people and/or have underlying health conditions such as diabetes or obesity.

Researchers are also seeking out those of racial or ethnic minority groups.

“Earlier studies of this vaccine have shown promise with some of the segments of society that have been hardest hit, such as African Americans, Latinx, Native Americans and Asian-Americans,” said Research Your Health in a press release.

These demographics are especially crucial for the Plano clinical trial given how severely they have been impacted by the pandemic, but a history of racial injustice in clinical trials conducted in the United States has cultivated mistrust among a segment of Black Americans. The most infamous of these were the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, where researchers were suspected of leaving syphilis untreated on Black male patients to observe its effects. To get patients to consent to this four-decade study, the United States Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention falsely claimed they were giving them free health care.

A 2015 study from the National Institute of Health found that because of experiments such as these, mistrust of the United States health care system has caused white patients to be more represented in clinical trials than Black patients. This disparity may very well extend itself to clinical trials such as the one in Plano, as civil rights activists such as Louis Farrakhan have urged followers to avoid taking a COVID-19 vaccine.

To overcome this systemic barrier, civil rights activist Rev. Peter Johnson became the first patient in Texas to take the Novavax vaccine.

“I am here today because I have been getting calls from all over Black America,” he said. “We are literally burying our people because of this pandemic. This pandemic is what I call an ‘equal opportunity offender’ – it doesn’t care who if affects. Consequently, Black leaders like myself, Black athletes, Black entertainers… we must tell our people, ‘They have to protect our community from this epidemic.’ I’m here to say to Black Americans, ‘Protect Yourself! We’re going to take this shot and we’re going to request that Black America takes this seriously – and gets vaccinated.’”