Health care workers answer questions about the COVID-19 vaccines.
Valerie Montgomery Rice, MD explains which groups and organizations were involved in the COVID vaccine development process.
So, you got the private industry here, these pharma companies who had been working on this technology. You got NIH, which we call public that’s been working on this technology. They came together and said, “Where are we?” So that actually, I think enabled the technology to be ready for prime time.
But then you also have the public, which is NIH, that has an entire infrastructure for how we do clinical trials. We have a patient base and a volunteer pace of people who really want to be in clinical trials. You also had the HIV research trial network. All of those researchers shifted their time now to doing COVID research.
So, you had a public private partnership that came together that allowed us to enroll 30 to 40,000 people from multiple sites with diverse backgrounds into a clinical trial. We removed the red tape. That’s what was the warp speed component of it, but they did not deviate from any of the required investigation or review board approvals, any of the institutional approvals, any of the volunteer consent. So, none of that was deviated.
