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AstraZeneca may have preventedly saved my life by vaccinating against the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. I’m not sure I can trust them or that possibility.
I was still in my pajamas on Saturday in mid-November when I saw an ad online: “We are now looking for participants in your area. Find out if you can join the Covid-19 vaccine study. “
The coffee got cold as he kept clicking more and more, unearthing every detail he could. After a long and tense year of feeling powerless as Covid devastated the people of my country, this was one way to help.
I am not an essential worker, not a scientist, not a nurse, not a hospital ordinance, not even an undertaker. “Inesencial” had come to define my sense of identity as I sheltered at home for months. My main responsibility in this pandemic has been simply to keep my body out of the way.
AstraZeneca’s call for volunteers offered me the opportunity to put my body in danger. By lunchtime, he had completed the online screening. Within two days I received a follow-up email; three days, a phone call. On the fourth day, I went into a local research clinic to sign my informed consent and get a syringe of something in my arm.
However, “informed consent” is a complicated subject in studies like this: I can’t know what that “something” was.
I was one of the first rounds of Americans to join this double-blind, placebo-controlled phase III study of AZD1222. “Phase III” tells us, the volunteers: the 40,000 humans (eventually) whose health will be monitored. “Double blind” indicates what we volunteers cannot know: exactly what researchers put into our bodies. Even the medical staff in the study do not know what each injection contains. Two-thirds own AZD1222, the Covid-19 vaccine developed by pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca in partnership with the UK’s University of Oxford. The other third is simply salt water, as safe as the saline solution from the pharmacy that I use as eye drops.
After hours of in-person paperwork and a medical exam, I received my first injection on Wednesday, November 18. I left with an appointment card that reminded me to return in mid-December for a booster shot.
The next day, I had chills and a mild fever. These symptoms would have horrified me at any other point in this pandemic; in this context, they moved me. This was! This was the telltale immune response that the nurse had warned me that I might experience if I received the active vaccine. I am officially “blind” as to what is in my syringe, but since my temperature was throbbing around 100.2 ° F for a few hours and gradually returning to normal, I walked on air. As for me, my veins may have had a new elixir of life too.
On Monday, November 23, AstraZeneca announced that preliminary results from overseas clinical trials were promising. AZD1222 joined Pfizer and Moderna formulas to boast an efficacy of up to 90 percent. My joy increased: not only was I probably vaccinated against Covid-19, but my vaccine was probably 90 percent effective! Thoughts like “AstraZeneca may have prevented my life saved” filled me with gratitude and joy.
However, the joy did not last. AstraZeneca’s results came with an asterisk: the effectiveness of its formula depended on the size of doses the researchers had administered. The much-lauded “90 percent” protection was found in volunteers who received a half dose on their first appointment, followed by a full dose later. As the New York Times reported, “it was less effective when people received a standard full dose up front.” So far, the US trial has not included the most effective half-dose / full-dose regimen. American volunteers like me are following a regimen that is reportedly significantly less effective.
After a few days of feeling naively invincible, I revised my estimate downward – I may only be 62 percent protected from Covid-19, once I get my booster.
Could you trust even this less optimistic figure? In the days after AstraZeneca’s jubilant press release, more and more asterisks materialized. We learned that the two different dosing regimens were not deliberately implemented, but rather materialized due to a “manufacturing error” that affected the concentration of the vaccine. The resulting “fluke” only affected 2,741 British volunteers, a fraction of the total test pool. Furthermore, these 2,741 participants were all under 55 years of age and thus were not a representative sample compared to the rest of the study participants.
That brilliant, glee-inducing “90 percent efficiency” figure came from this smaller, younger group. As I mentioned, I am not a scientist. What was I supposed to do with this garbled data?
Over the course of a few more mornings, I let my coffee cool again as it clicked and clicked. It became clear that experts around the world were increasingly skeptical about how AstraZeneca has handled this entire situation, from the original manufacturing error, to the error that allowed volunteers to be injected incorrect doses, to the limited data it produced. this “chance”. to the opaque way in which they announced their results.
By Thanksgiving, my gratitude had given way to confusion. I stay awake at night, back in that familiar place of helpless not knowing. When I can’t sleep, I often meditate on my own heartbeat. Now that meditation led me to wonder what was beating through me.
At a time when Americans’ trust in experience has eroded, and basic science is politicized from left to right, we need scientific institutions that demonstrate rigor and transparency more than ever. After all, the effectiveness of a vaccine doesn’t just depend on the strength of each dose; It also depends on whether people are willing to roll up their sleeves for an injection in the first place.
I pondered on this Thursday after my injection while baking pumpkin pie for a festive one-house dinner. It had been a whirlwind of a ten day period. I found out about the study, came to the clinic and came out with a plaster over the injection site; I celebrated my fever and then the AstraZeneca press release, only to feel my brow gradually furrow again as the announcement was overshadowed by doubt.
Would some volunteers in my position lose confidence in the trial? Would they refuse to return for their second injection? When we signed our consent, we recognized that we were willing to remain uninformed as to what each syringe contained. Still, there is a difference between agreeing to participate in a blind study and offering our bodies to a company that (only, belatedly) recognized that its own mistakes have appreciably affected what happened to other people’s bodies.
He had some cold coffee and pumpkin pie, but my mood picked up. I’ve made peace with another iteration of relative ignorance. I cannot know for sure what is going on in my body. Nor can I know what is happening in the bodies of my neighbors; I can’t know where SARS-CoV-2 lurks in my community, which is inadvertently contagious in the park, whose local store clerk, thankfully, is already immune thanks to his own antibodies. Nature did not request my consent on this matter. I can also accept that I will always be more or less uninformed in the world.
I hold the pharmaceutical giants to a higher standard than nature, in general. I hope the researchers demonstrate ethics and transparency. AstraZeneca can and should be held accountable for any way it fell short in the race to implement its vaccine trials.
Perhaps this reflects the same unscientific naivety with which I celebrated that initial rush and felt invincible for a few days, but whenever I envision the researchers involved in every aspect of this study, I keep coming back to a simple maxim: we are all just Humans.
To err is human. It is also human to forgive, correct, collaborate.
It’s humane for doctors and nurses to work double shifts in the intensive care unit, wearing N-95 respirators until purple outlines dig into their cheeks. It’s human for people like me to spend vacations away from family this year rather than risk endangering strangers by traveling to see them. It’s human for vaccine researchers, with the burden of other people’s lives and deaths looming over them as they work for months, exhausting themselves and slipping from time to time. At least that’s how I’ve come to see it.
Humanity has flaws; we are often wrong. We are also a kind of individuals who step in when called and risk their bodies for each other in any way we can. The fact that thousands of people volunteer for studies like this, not knowing exactly what side effects or consequences they may experience, is proof of our ability to do good.
So has AstraZeneca preventatively saved my life?
My brief moment of unbridled joy was a welcome break from this long and rough year. I’m ready to be realistic again. I probably got a dose of AZD1222. It was probably a full dose, as opposed to the 2,741 British volunteers who were accidentally given a regimen that could prove more effective once the researchers gather more data. That means I am probably on my way to having some degree of protection against Covid-19, particularly after receiving my booster dose.
I have no doubt that I will be back for the second injection as scheduled. The point of signing my consent was not to be rewarded with guaranteed immunity. It was to offer my body as one of thousands of data points, so that collectively we can work to ensure the best possible vaccination regimen. He knew from the start that he might not get any vaccinations, much less a good one. I just hope that I can help the rest of humanity protect themselves against this pandemic and save as many lives as we can along the way.
My thanks to the AstraZeneca researchers who have developed this vaccine and are working to test it around the world, with asterisks and all.
