Coronavirus Vaccine Shows First Signs Of Promise, But Still Long Road Ahead, Says Art Caplan

Moderna Vaccine — A subject receives a shot in the first-stage safety study clinical trial of a potential vaccine by Moderna for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

Hannah Uebele is a producer for Under the Radar with Callie Crossley and previously worked as associate producer for Boston Public Radio. She graduated from Tufts University with a B.S. in English and Environmental Studies. She's a proud Delawarean but has found herself saying "wicked" more and more often, so the Bostonian metamorphosis is well underway.Contact: hannah_uebele@wgbh.org

July 15, 2020

Updated August 07, 2023

Moderna, a biotech company based in Cambridge, Mass., announced Tuesday that their experimental coronavirus vaccine succeeded its Phase 1 trial. An immune response was triggered in all 45 people who received the vaccine in the trial, researchers reported.

But medical ethicist Arthur Caplan told Boston Public Radio on Wednesday that you should "not be as excited as Donald Trump, not as excited as the stock market, and not as excited as a lot of the news reports," regarding this success. That's because although the Phase 1 study had good results, the next phases will be prolonged and much more challenging, Caplan said.

"This is a study that's called a Phase 1 study, a safety study primarily," he said. "It had good results, people built a little immunity, however it's probably many, many, many months away to recruit and complete the key study, which is a randomized trial on 30,000 people."

Art Caplan is the Drs. William F and Virginia Connolly Mitty Chair, and director of the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.