Real-Life vaccination as clinical trials

Beginning May 1, India will open up vaccination to its entire adult population. It is essential to secure maximum amount of data to analyse and understand the impact of the vaccines. The government needs to put in place a system that will allow vaccine recipients to volunteer to share health-related data that will be anonymised.

Across the world, Covid-19 vaccines have been given emergency approvals. Basically, long and protracted trials that vaccines developers ordinarily undertake to understand how the vaccine interacts with the human body has been abridged, given the urgency of containing Covid. Effectively, instead of a long, limited group of people taking part in a trial, Covid vaccines are undergoing mass trials. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the country’s apex medical research body, should devise a follow-up protocol and ask vaccination centres to request those being vaccinated to volunteer for this study. Besides the volunteers providing information, they should be requested to undergo periodic check-ups. Israel made such a commitment to obtain its quota of messenger-RNA vaccines early on. The sample will need to reflect the diversity of the population. The information will be extremely useful to ascertain any long-term side effects, besides vaccine performance among different segments of the population. Information on multiple data points will allow for vaccine developers to refine their product or develop follow-up shots or even new therapies.

This exercise will help not just with development of new Covid-19 vaccines but also give a better sense of the workings of the virus and could spur the development of therapies for dealing with Covid-19 and cures or vaccines for related diseases. The process must begin now.