Hattiesburg will host one of 89 nationwide vaccine trial regional centers for the coronavirus pandemic beginning in early August, principal investigator Dr. Rambod A. Rouhbakhsh announced at Hattiesburg Clinic Tuesday afternoon.
The Hattiesburg Cough and Fever Clinic has been the primary facility for COVID-19 testing. Hattiesburg Clinic and Forrest General Hospital have partnered in the clinic.
Rouhbakhsh said he is proud the Hattiesburg health centers will be participating in the coronavirus vaccine tests.
“It's important that these clinical trials are being conducted outside of traditional academic centers, which tend to be focused in large cities,” he said. “So we need to have an idea of how this works in all locations, and trial sites like ours are very rare. It's one of the things I'm most proud of being a member of the Hattiesburg Clinic and this medical community. We punch above our weight. We have resources here that are far beyond a city of our size typically, and so I feel quite honored to be a part of that elite group.”
Hattiesburg will also be including a large number of the patients for the vaccine trials, Rouhbakhsh noted.
“Depending on the size of the community and the size of the clinical trial will determine how many people will be enrolled,” he said. “Institutions that are trained up . . . some of those are participating and they have much larger clinical research sites and many more physicians that can participate. So, they will enroll more people in in larger cities, but in our location, we've been asked to shoot for around 300. We think we can get closer to 500.”
Rouhbakhsh said enrollment will begin in early August and the vaccine trial lab will have a website available where volunteers can see if they want to participate in the study. Specific inclusion and exclusion criteria are associated with the trials. Because it is a clinical trial, volunteers will receive either vaccine tests or placebos, Rouhbakhsh said.
“The participants and the investigators won't know if the study participants are getting the actual investigational medication or the placebo,” he said. “So, once they receive it, we will follow patients along for the duration of the trial and assess both their symptoms and their response to the investigational drug. That information is processed centrally to purposely keep the investigators blinded so that we don't treat the individual study participants any differently.”
If the test is effective, the trial could end early because it would be unethical to continue with it and deny the placebo group of patients. If data is compiled from all 89 sites and determined to be going really well, a wide release would not occur until the early part of 2021.
“You have to bear in mind if we give the vaccine to one group, and the placebo to the other, we then send both groups out into the world and see what becomes of them. Actually the placebo group will have to get the illness for us to know that there's a difference. Unfortunately in America, we have a lot of cases. So, the likelihood of getting this illness is quite high," the doctor explained.
The purpose of the Moderna-sponsored study is to test how safe and effective the study vaccine is at preventing illness after someone is exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.