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time - that's where you have people queuing up," she said. "Anyone
who runs that kind of a clinic, you have to modify the strategy so
that people don't que up."
Drive-thru clinics for immunization are pretty successful,
Johnson said.
"I'm not encouraging private providers to create flu drive-thrus
in their own parking lot, but I think some of the hospitals maybe
changing to do that," she said. "It's a strategy that allows for more
social distancing."

Confidence and social media
In the end, what's the key to restoring people's confidence in the
COVID-19 vaccine?
"The problem right now is we don't know which vaccine we are
talking about and we actually haven't seen the safety and efficacy
data," Johnson said. "I don't think it will be smart for us to go ahead
and say: 'We haven't seen any of the study results, but we're sure it's
safe.' We're not going to do that."

IN CRISIS, PFIZER
MOVES AT
EXTRAORDINARY
SPEED
The group composed of Pfizer/BioNTech/
Fosun Pharma is working, along with 41 other
companies, to provide a vaccine to the general
public. According to Pfizer, headquartered
in New York, "safe and effective vaccines are
key to defeating this pandemic and helping
to provide protection from this devastating
disease."
As of press time, what is the latest on
their work?
Here are some answers by Dr. David L.
Swerdlow, global COVID-19 vaccine medical
lead, clinical epidemiology lead, business
development lead, Pfizer vaccines.
What is your role in vaccine development?
I have been at Pfizer for five years working
on licensed and pipeline vaccines developing
epidemiologic projects worldwide. Before
joining Pfizer, I worked at the CDC for 25
years. From 2009- 2015, I was the associate
director for science, National Center for

16 Philadelphia Medicine : Fall 2020

Social media is really just a conduit, according to James Garrow,
communications, Philadelphia Department of Public Health.
Getting the message out may require using a modified "messenger"
and who that messenger is.
"As great as I think our social media presence is, and as fun and
hip as we can be, we are the public health department, we are probably not destination-cool or hip for influencing anyone," Garrow
said. "From our perspective, I like to think it's less about us crafting
messages and more about us finding who those influencers may be
that have a social media presence and kind of piggyback off of them."
Garrow thinks there is some value in using the medical community "because there are doctors out there who have significant
social media presences and that they are looked up to over the
last seven or eight months as experts. It's incumbent upon us to
begin to work with them to not only just be the staid public health
department but also tap into the people that the public and social
media audiences are listening to, so we can amplify our messages
and use them as validators."

Immunization and Respiratory Diseases
(NCIRD) and also led the NCIRD Infectious
Disease Modeling Unit. I held leadership roles
during numerous CDC emergency responses
including the Influenza A (H1N1) outbreak,
cholera in Haiti, Hurricane Katrina and
the anthrax bioterrorism attacks. I led the
response to the MERS coronavirus epidemic
for two years: the last coronavirus epidemic
the world faced before the current one.
What are your tests for vaccine efficacy
and safety?
We believe that safe and effective vaccines
are key to defeating this pandemic and helping
to provide protection from this devastating
disease. We are conducting our clinical
development program in a thoughtful way
with patient safety as a foremost consideration.

enroll participants from many backgrounds
and ages to better understand the potential
safety and efficacy of the vaccine in these
groups.
This will constitute a large safety database
consistent with other large efficacy trials that
have resulted in regulatory approvals for other
vaccines in the past. What is different this time
is that we have mustered enormous resources
up front to enroll and dose participants as
efficiently as possible.
In September, Pfizer and eight other
biopharma companies announced a historic
pledge, outlining a united ongoing commitment to make the safety and well-being
of vaccinated individuals their top priority,
while upholding the integrity of the scientific
process as they work toward planned global
regulatory filings and potential authorization
or approval of the first COVID-19 vaccines.

Even though we are moving with extraordinary speed, preserving high quality and
safety standards is critically important to us What are the steps involved now before
throughout the development process. We plan the vaccine can be released to the public?
to enroll approximately 44,000 participants
On July 27, Pfizer and BioNTech anin our Phase 3 trial, with approximately half nounced the start of a global Phase 2/3
of them receiving active vaccine and the other safety and efficacy clinical study to evaluate
half receiving placebo. In October 2020, we BNT162b2, a messenger RNA (mRNA)
received permission from the FDA to enroll COVID-19 vaccine candidate. The candidate
adolescents as young as 12. Our goal is to was selected out of four clinically-evaluated

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Philadelphia Medicine Fall 2020

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