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Doctors and scientists must show more empathy for volunteers in coronavirus vaccine trials who become ill so that the public has full confidence in the safety of the vaccines being developed, experts say.
The temporary suspension of the Oxford University / AstraZeneca trial after a volunteer in the UK entered the hospital was good news, not bad, said Heidi Larson, who heads the Vaccine Confidence in School Project. of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, as demonstrated. that scientists and the company were putting safety first.
“But a lot of the response from the medical / scientific community was that this is a routine measure, it is standard,” Larson said. “From the public’s perspective, nobody says we are sorry for the disease. There is nothing from an empathy perspective, or [anyone saying] we hope this person recovers.
“For audiences who may have some anxiety, you can reinforce that. So we have good news in terms of the rigor of security, but I think we have to work on how we deliver it. “
Larson was speaking as his team published their latest global survey on confidence in vaccines in the Lancet medical journal, which found a highly variable picture around the world. “It goes up, it goes down and it can go up again,” she said. This could happen in response to events that scare people and in accordance with public confidence in governments offering or sometimes demanding vaccines.
Early work on attitudes towards a Covid-19 vaccine shows that there was more excitement at the peak of the pandemic in the UK than later.
“We see that it is very variable. In late March in the UK, when death rates were high, only 5% said they would not take the Covid vaccine. By June, that had risen to about 15% as people saw death rates drop, because people are constantly weighing the imminent threat of the disease and the threat of a new vaccine.
“Keeping people informed is important. There will be tests that will not reach the end. From a trustworthy perspective, I think that as a scientific community we have not done a good job of explaining why things are moving faster. We see fast, fast, fast: the first to arrive “.
There were good reasons why it was now possible to move quickly, such as the funding available to Covid vaccine developers and new technologies. “This is not an old short-cut vaccination process,” he said, but added that it had not been adequately explained to the public.
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