Kenya: Inside Kenya’s Coronavirus Vaccine Policy As Testing Begins

The first African countries that can receive the Covid-19 vaccine is July 2021, the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

That, the shortage of time for scientists developing a vaccine, is not the only headache that the team from the Wellcome Trust Program of the Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) will have to endure on the way to obtaining a vaccine. .

Instead, Sunday Nation explains how Kenyan scientists have had to traverse muddy waters to get a vaccine the country so desperately needs.

In addition to the usual unpredictability of science in evaluating vaccines, distributing them down the cold chain, there is also the deliberate delay of ethical approvals and careless statements by politicians that turn an already skeptical community anti-vaccines.

On October 28, the Kilifi-based Kemri-Welcome Trust Research program began trials of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford in partnership with the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

Kenya’s participation in this trial is very important: there are 13 vaccines under test. Kenya and South Africa are the only African countries participating.

The man behind the trials, Oxford University Associate Professor George Warimwe, was thrown into the public eye and is well aware of the burden on his team’s shoulder.

A vaccine would change the rules of the game against the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 1,400, infected more than 81,000 and paralyzed the economy.

The Sunday Nation visited the team in Kilifi, where they are recruiting 40 frontline workers.

Once safety is confirmed, the study will recruit another 360 and expand the research to 400.

This is a phase 2 trial, where hundreds are tested to verify the safety of vaccines.

After the Oxford team established in phase 1 that the vaccine could trigger an immune response, it was allowed for use in healthcare workers, the people most exposed to the virus.

Professor Warimwe told the Sunday Nation that “everything is going as expected.” However, Kenya began its tests almost five months after its counterparts in the UK, South Africa and Brazil. From Health Ministry sources, the Sunday Nation established that the ethical procedures necessary to initiate vaccines, a very standard procedure in any human medicine, were delayed due to internal disagreements within the ministry.

Each agency, or those that lead it, does not want to miss this opportunity to save lives. However, they delay approvals if they don’t get their pound of meat in glory. Finally, after other countries began to report the preliminary results of their trials and saw how popular those governments became with their citizens, Kilifi’s team got the go-ahead to begin the investigation.

Health Secretary Mutahi Kagwe told the Sunday Nation that Kilifi’s team “deserved real credit.”

These small wars have affected not just the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 trials at Kilifi, but another study to follow hospital patients to see if there are long-term effects of the virus on the body after one is cured. of Covid-19.

Political interference

A renowned scientist laments that former executive director of the University of Kenyatta Teaching Research and Referral Hospital, Dr. Wekesa Masasabi, “refused to allow us to follow up patients, but that center houses a large number of patients with Covid-19 “.

In a country where regulatory bodies are not autonomous and independent from political interference, the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 trial did not help when several popular politicians said on social media that the vaccine was a tactic to use Kenyans as guinea pigs.

After working on vaccines for a while, Professor Warimwe had been here before and was ready. At the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Hospital, getting vaccinated is not a matter of one day for a patient.

Volunteers have a designated door, where they meet the first nurse to take their temperatures, contact details, and history. They are transferred to another room, where a counselor will explain how the vaccine will be administered: a puncture in the upper arm that is not used often, the tests they will go through and give the volunteer a chance to withdraw.

Once they give their consent, the volunteers are transferred to three other rooms for research where doctors examine their kidneys and blood.

The nurse in charge of the trial project, Irene Njau, told the Sunday Nation: “If it is found that they have been infected with the virus, are pregnant, have a chronic illness or are breastfeeding, they are not eligible to participate in the trial.”

Medical conditions

If a volunteer is found with medical conditions that require attention, the Kilifi program takes the volunteer to the hospital. As all this progresses, Professor Warimwe has to report every detail of the vaccine’s activities to numerous regulatory bodies, as dictated by the World Health Organization giving the guidelines.

“The protocols include the initial document that was approved to guide the study and it is the same in all details with the Board of Pharmacy and Poisons, the World Health Organization, Kemri … everyone,” he says.

Professor Warimwe said this is to protect the well-being of the participants and that the assessment is standard.

“It is so strict that if I wanted to add a scientist’s name to the team, I have to apply for another approval,” he told the Sunday Nation.

Professor Warimwe does not start from a blank slate. In June, the Oxford team reported that results of phase I and II peer-reviewed trials showed that the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine induces strong antibody and T-cell immune responses in all age groups, including those older adults.

Phase 3 trials, the only stage in vaccine development where rare side effects are seen because thousands were tested and some received a placebo, were positive: they offer 70% protection overall, but greater (90% ) when they give a lower dose the second time.

The results came days after the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines showed 95% protection.