Gov’t wants uniform compensation for vaccine trial volunteers

There should be a standard rate of compensation for individuals who will take part in the clinical trials for potential vaccines against the new coronavirus.

This was the recommendation of the subtechnical working group (sub-TWG) on vaccine development that was approved by the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) in a resolution on Thursday.

“The Philippine Health Research Ethics Board should review the ethical guidelines for the COVID-19 clinical trials and standardize compensation of trial participants both for the WHO (World Health Organization) Solidarity Trial and independent clinical trials,” according to Resolution No. 65.

The ethics board represents various sectors, including medicine, social science, law, youth, philosophy, and theology. It is an attached agency of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and was established to ensure the protection of human participants in research.

Zoning guidelines

The IATF resolution said “all applications for clinical trials should first be submitted to the vaccine expert panel, reviewed by designated ethics boards and submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for review and approval for conduct of clinical trials.”

The vaccine expert panel is another DOST agency.

The IATF also directed the sub-TWG on vaccine development to issue “zoning guidelines on vaccine clinical trials … to avoid competition for sites.”

It told local governments to prioritize the WHO Solidarity Trial over those of potential vaccines being developed by various countries against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the severe respiratory disease.

The Philippines is expected to carry out the third phase of clinical trials on four or five vaccines that passed the WHO’s prequalification process.

These are apart from clinical trials for Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine expected to be implemented from October 2020 to March 2021.

President Rodrigo Duterte volunteered to be first to be inoculated to show confidence in the Russian-developed vaccine.

The Philippines has also partnered with five Chinese biopharmaceutical companies for clinical trials of their vaccines.

The DOST’s Philippine Council for Health Research and Development earlier said participants in vaccine clinical trials should be healthy and not sick. Participants may get a small amount for food and transportation for the time they spend on the clinical trial, it said.

The President has disallowed in-person classes until a cure or a vaccine had been found against COVID-19.

China, Russia, the United States, and several European nations are racing to produce vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, which has infected more than 22.7 million people and killed 794,021 across the globe as of Friday.

Virus case update

In Manila, the Department of Health (DOH) on Friday reported 4,786 more who got infected, bringing the national caseload to 182,365.

That number is higher than the 179,838 projected for Aug. 21 by researchers from the University of the Philippines, who estimated that the total would hit 209,091 by the end of the month.

The DOH said that of the new cases reported by 103 out of the 109 accredited laboratories, 3,702 were found positive for the virus between Aug. 8 and 21, and 454 between Aug. 1 and Aug. 7.

Metro Manila accounted for the majority of the new cases with 2,716, followed by Cavite (267), Laguna (222), Batangas (185), and Rizal (185). There are now a total of 64,906 active cases; 91.5 percent of them are mild, 6.5 percent asymptomatic, 0.8 percent severe and 1.2 percent critical.

The DOH said 616 patients added to the number who had recovered which now total 114,519 nationwide. The death toll, however, climbed to 2,940 after 59 succumbed to the disease—41 of them died in August, 16 in July, and two in April.

Twenty-eight of the fatalities were from Metro Manila, 11 from Calabarzon, nine from Western Visayas, five from Eastern Visayas, three from the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, and one each from Ilocos, Central Luzon, and Central Visayas. —WITH A REPORT FROM JOVIC YEE