Doctor: We're 'deeply concerned' about how politicized COVID-19 has become

Meharry Medical College President and CEO Dr. James Hildreth joins the On the Move panel to discuss the need for diversity in COVID-19 vaccine trials.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Joining us from Nashville Tennessee, Dr. Hildreth, it's good to have you back on the program. When we talk about the search and the race for a vaccine, the trials that are underway-- are they including in appropriate ways people of color who have succumbed to this disease in ways that people who are not have not had to deal with?

JAMES HILDRETH: Thank you, Adam. It's good to be with you again. I think there is a concerted effort being made to enroll minorities in the vaccine studies. We're going to be part of Operation Warp Speed here at Meharry Medical College. So we're already starting to reach out to the communities through churches and other mechanisms to make sure that our community members are part of the trial.

Generally speaking, the human immune system functions more or less the same across racial groups. But there are some subtle differences in our-- let's call it the HLA complex-- that sometimes it makes for different immune responses. So I think it's very, very important that all the populations that need the vaccine need to be evaluated for how effective the vaccine works in those groups. And so we're excited to be a part of the studies.

JULIE HYMAN: Dr. Hildreth, it's Julie here. It's great to see you again. Now that the vaccine efforts are ramping up, we are now starting to get a little bit more of a debate about whether there will be pressure to be quicker than perhaps we should. We're getting reports out of Russia that there is going to be October perhaps roll out of vaccine administration. And there's some concern about that. Well, what are your concerns on that front? And are you additionally concerned that the minority community-- because they've been disproportionately affected by this-- might then be more vulnerable to getting vaccines that aren't quite ready?

JAMES HILDRETH: So I've been studying vaccines and viruses for 40 years. And one of the things I'm reminding people is that none of the steps in producing a vaccine are being skipped in this case. Some of them are being run in parallel. So it's not that steps are being omitted. It's just that the compression of the timeframe has been achieved by doing steps in parallel.

I'm not going to be one of the lead investigators here at Meharry because I intend to be one of the participants in the studies to make the point that I can't encourage others to sign up for the vaccine study if I'm not confident to be part of them ourselves. And I think the vaccine we're going to be doing here at Meharry is the AstraZeneca, the one developed by the folks at Oxford, which is really a modified cold virus that displays part of the COVID-19 viruses coat protein. And so I'm confident that the vaccine will be safe, and I'm anxious to be a part of this study from the participant point of view.

Now the vaccine from Russia, we don't have any data about this vaccine. They've not disclosed much. So we can't evaluate it. But it would be hard for me to imagine that a vaccine could have been safely evaluated in enough individuals that we need to have it evaluated in to feel comfortable in accepting the vaccine from Russia.

Now maybe they did do all the necessary steps in large numbers of individuals. But we have no way of judging that because none of the data has been disclosed.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Dr. Hildreth what concerns, if any, do you have about the race for the vaccine and these trials to be politicized with potential to force an announcement that we've got the vaccine before the presidential election when, in fact, that might be a rush?

JAMES HILDRETH: Well, I think all of us who are in public health and science are deeply concerned about how political some aspects of the fight against the virus have become. For example, it was really clear that, for a time, wearing a mask had become politicized in a way that it never should have been.

I also think that politics has got in the way of a nationally coordinated response. That's what we needed from the very beginning. Viruses do not respect borders. They don't respect city borders, county borders, state borders. So unless we as a nation have a concerted, coordinated approach to fighting the virus, we get what we get, which is what you've heard from Dr. Birx, that the virus is now touching rural communities, all communities, urban, and otherwise.

So I have a concern that we not rush the vaccine for political reasons. But I have confidence, in being part of the science myself, that none of the steps are being omitted. And I would never advocate for people receiving a vaccine that I didn't feel had gone through all the rigors that we needed to go through. And that's actually happening. So I think people can be confident that all the steps necessary to develop a safe vaccine, they're being taken. It's just that some of those steps are being, as I said before, they're happening in parallel.