CINCINNATI, Ohio — A new coronavirus vaccine is coming to Ohio and researchers want you to help them test it out.
- Vaccing testing expecting to start around May 11
- Researchers taking 90 volunteers to start
- Targeting healthy adults and minorities
“It’s not a guinea pig, theses are individuals,” said Dr. Robert Frenck.
Dr. Frenck is the director at the Vaccine Research Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. He says in about a week, volunteers will be given the new coronavirus vaccine.
“What we’re doing is we’re taking a piece of the genetic material of the virus that makes this protein, it is not a live virus, so the vaccine can not give you Covid 19,” said Frenck.
The vaccine is coming from a pharmaceutical company. If it works, he says your body will create antibodies to fight off the main protein in the coronavirus.
He says there could be challenges if the virus mutates and there are risks of side effects that they don’t yet know about.
“With any new treatment there’s risks and sometimes the therapy or vaccines or whatever don’t work, but that’s why we start in small numbers and increase,” said Frenck.
He says they’re starting with 90 volunteers. If it works, then 150 will get the vaccine, and eventually thousands.
He says first they’re targeting healthy adults 18 and up and minorities for the early trials.
“We are very interested and also want to make sure we have a good representation of the minority population because what you may have seen is that the percentage of deaths in the black population is 2 to 2.5 times what you’d expect,” Frenck said.
He says eventually they’ll move on to children to get the vaccine, but he says the whole process to make sure it's safe and effective could take more than a year to finish.
If you don’t want to wait that long for the vaccine, you can sign up to volunteer in the vaccine trials.