On Monday 17th August the government’s taskforce announced that over 110,000 people had signed up for trials which could begin as soon as next month as it appealed for thousands of volunteers from British Asian communities to participate in its coronavirus vaccine trials.
The fresh appeal from the NHS appears following a “disappointing” uptake in the first phase where only 3% of the volunteers were from British Asian backgrounds. Of the 112,104 volunteers who have signed up for the trials since 20 July, 94% were white. One in 10 of the volunteers work in health and social care, while a third are classed as frontline workers who have face-to-face contact with people due to their job. The vaccination group has said that researchers needed to do more to reach communities who may not speak English as a first language or watch mainstream television news and may be unaware of the vaccine trials.
Dr Dinesh Saralaya, is one of the directors of the recruitment programme, and describing the low uptake as “very worrying” in a statement to The Guardian he said,
“It’s very important that we dispel the myths in the Asian community that vaccines are going to be harmful,” said Saralaya, who runs a National Institute for Health Research patient recruitment centre in Bradford.
“It’s perfectly safe. They are very, very closely monitored and there are very strict protocols. The standard of care is in fact better than what you would receive outside of a trial [and] the side effects are very, very minimal.”
A targeted recruitment programme broadcast in Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali and Polish is to be launched, while respected community leaders will be used to spread to message to harder-to-reach neighbourhoods.
Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer,has also urged that more people from diverse backgrounds must sign up for the trials. He said, “The more people who volunteer to take part, the more likely we find an answer to whether any vaccine is effective.
“Having 100,000 volunteers in just four weeks shows the selflessness of the public and is testament to the speed of work done by the vaccines taskforce, National Institute for Health Research and others to make signing up possible. I urge people to continue to sign up. It is important that we have people from different backgrounds and ages as volunteers, so that the vaccines that are developed work for everyone.”
