Over 100,000 people worldwide are taking part in coronavirus vaccine trials. NPR answers common questions, such as why so many people are needed and what it means to say a vaccine works.
More than 200,000 people in the U.S. have now died from COVID-19, and scientists around the world are racing to develop a vaccine to prevent the disease. So far, they've enrolled more than a hundred thousand volunteers to test the leading vaccine candidates. NPR science correspondent Joe Palca has been looking into how we will know whether a vaccine is truly effective and when we might have that answer.
I spoke with Ruth Karron, director of the Johns Hopkins Vaccine Initiative, and she says volunteers will be told to do all the things that will keep them healthy - hand-washing, wearing a mask, social distancing. PALCA: And also, they need a lot of people because the trials will have two groups - people who actually get the vaccine and people who just get an injection with an inert liquid, like saline.
PALCA: Exactly. Well, that's a possibility. But there are two good reasons why that doesn't happen. First of all, there's something called double-blind, which I'm sure you've heard of. It means...PALCA: ...When you get jabbed in this study, you don't know what you're getting jabbed with, and the person doing the jabbing doesn't know what he or she is giving you.
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