MARBLEHEAD — When Peter Jackson received a call in July asking him to participate in Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine trial, the Marblehead resident didn’t hesitate.
An executive for a subsidiary of healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson, Jackson (who was not speaking on behalf of his company) said he had no qualms about jumping headfirst into the biotech giant’s vaccine race, the local trials for which would take place right at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
“I knew it wasn’t going to kill me, and I knew Brigham and Women’s was one of the preeminent medical centers in the United States,” Jackson said. “If you’re going to be a part of any kind of trial for a vaccine, you want to be in the academic center.”
Jackson, who is African American, said his racial background was largely what prompted him to take on the challenge, adding that thanks to his professional training — which includes extensive working knowledge of Johnson & Johnson’s HIV studies — he felt more than prepared for what lay ahead.
“This is the world I live in. I’ve been in pharmaceuticals for over 20 years. Even though that had nothing to do with me being in the study, I had the education,” he said. “All I do is talk about clinical trials, so I had a really strong understanding of what was going on.”
Moderna, whose vaccine was approved by the Food and Drug Administration late last week, is the second healthcare company — after Pfizer — to receive the go-ahead for U.S. distribution.
However, medical experts across the U.S. expressed concern during the vaccine’s early trials that people of color weren’t accurately represented, despite being one of the demographics most devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Minority enrollment was so poor, in fact, that Moderna was at one point forced to shut down sites with high Caucasian enrollment to avoid skewing test results.
“When you look at the graph, it’s amazing,” Jackson said. “If you were a white male living in the suburbs, they didn’t need you anymore. They had too many people living in the suburbs that were working at home who weren’t exposed to anything. What they really needed was the guy driving the bus for the MBTA. He’s at risk every single day.”
There’s a reason for that lack of enrollment, Jackson explained. Much of the medical distrust seen throughout some African-American communities stems from the nation’s history of conducting medical experiments, such as the Tuskegee syphilis study that ran from 1932 to 1972, that used Black Americans as unwitting test subjects in the name of science.
Although Jackson also works from home during the pandemic, he knew that as a person of color, his presence in the study was important.
“I know from my HIV work with Johnson & Johnson that we want to get people of color,” he said. “We want diversity in the trials, because that’s a real reflection of the community.”
However, friends and family weren’t so supportive, and Jackson noted that he initially asked nearly 50 acquaintances if they would also be interested in participating. Only one even considered the request.
“People were like, ‘they’re going to put COVID into you. You’re going to grow a third arm,’” he said. “There’s such a level of mistrust and misunderstanding.”
It took nearly a month after that first phone call before Jackson — who referees high school basketball, soccer and lacrosse in his free time — was finally approved to join the trial. He received the first dose of the vaccine in late August, and the second in October.
The father of two adult children, who makes a point of donating blood every month, had no idea whether he’d received the placebo or the actual vaccine until several months later when yet another call, this time from the American Red Cross, gave him a strong hunch.
“I was contacted by the Red Cross saying I had COVID antibodies,” he said. “Because I had to get (frequent) COVID tests for the trial, I knew I’d never had it.
“Now I have COVID antibodies, even though I’ve never had COVID.”
Although many may laud him for his bravery, Jackson simply feels he was fulfilling a moral obligation.
“You don’t think of it in terms of being part of a historic study,” he said. “There’s a phrase that I’ve always lived by: ‘If you can’t do great things, do small things great,’
“I knew this was something I could participate in, that I could control, and I wanted to represent the community.”