The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced on Monday the website allowing people to register and volunteer for the clinical trials of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines. Latinos and African-Americans are the top priorities.

COVID-19 Vaccine
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The website coronaviruspreventionnetwork.org was launched Wednesday. This website will allow people across the United States to register and volunteer for the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials.

NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told the CNN News that there is a need of around 30,000 volunteers to participate in the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials.

However, Fred Hutchinson said that through a press release on Wednesday, there are 10,000 to 30,000 volunteers needed for every trial. So that means that there is a need for thousands of volunteers to move forward for the study.

Who Can Volunteer?

Those who have the intention to take part in the clinical trial should visit the website coronaviruspreventionnetwork.org. Volunteers should fill out a quick questionnaire.

There are over 100 sites in the United States and abroad. After registering on the website, your information will be passed to the location closest to your area.

Several of the questions include the following:

  • How likely you are to get infected and sick with COVID-19
  • The volunteer's race
  • The type of work you have
  • How many people you encountered every day

The qualification of the volunteers is based on the volunteers' responses to the questions above. The researchers are looking for people from the Latino and African-American communities who have been hardest hit by COVID-19.

In Seattle, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, as the coordinating center for vaccine clinical trials run by the Covid-19 Prevention Network, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health, said that qualified volunteers who will wear masks during the test would not help the result of the study.

The primary purpose of the clinical trial is to see if the vaccine protects people from getting infected. If people get vaccinated and will stay at home or will wear a mask while exposed to the public, it will be hard for the researchers to know if the vaccine would be useful or not.

This trial means that those who want to volunteer to participate in the clinical trial should be willing to take the risk to get exposed to the public. This way is to determine if the vaccine is valid or not.

Dr. Carl Fichtenbaum, medical director of the Moderna trial at the University of Cincinnati Health, said that they need Latinos, African-Americans, and representatives from the hardest-hit communities.

Doctors also said that they would recruit volunteers at churches and organizations from the hardest-hit communities. Additionally, they will look for volunteers from factories and meatpacking plants where there is a high risk of getting infected.

Moreover, the clinical trial also aims that 4o percent of the volunteers should be 65 years old and above or with medical conditions like hypertension, lung disease, diabetes, and obesity because they are more likely to become ill with COVID-19.

Meanwhile, Moderna, the frontrunner in developing the COVID-19 vaccine, has just finished a safety trial with more than 100 volunteers. However, it has not yet released the results.

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