'It's so exciting to wake up to good news': Vaccine trial volunteer on potential coronavirus breakthrough

When Jennifer Haller started trial number of global deaths stood at just 9,000 she tells Andrew Buncombe

Jennifer Haller was first American to receive shot of potential Covid-19 vaccine (AP)

Jennifer Haller was at home when she learned the news.

Trials of a possible Covid-19 vaccine in which she was taking part had been shown to boost the “immune response” of participants. What’s more, the lower doses of the drug appeared to be as effective as the high dose being trialled.

“Man! I mean, that’s really so exciting,” she tells The Independent of her reaction of seeing the news. “I think 10 days ago they got approval to move on to the phase two trial, which was great news. But this is solid clear evidence they’re seeing the immunity they were looking for in this trial. It’s super, super exciting.”

As it was, the announcement from Moderna, the Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company that has been testing a vaccine called mRNA-1273 based on messenger RNA molecules, was overshadowed by other medical news, namely Donald Trump’s claim he was taking hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug he has pushed for weeks as a Covid-19 treatment, despite it not being approved by the FDA and which can have serious side effects.

It may be, the trial in which Haller is participating will prove more significant than the one the president claims he is conducting upon himself, under the purported watch of White House physician Navy Cmdr Sean Patrick Conley.

While a number of other trials of potential vaccines are under way around the world – one is being developed by Pennsylvania-based Inovio Pharmaceuticals, while another is being trialled in the UK in a project involving Oxford University and AstraZeneca - Moderna said it was encouraged by these first results. It will now move onto the next phase, with more volunteers.

“These interim Phase 1 data, while early, demonstrate that vaccination with mRNA-1273 elicits an immune response of the magnitude caused by natural infection starting with a dose as low as 25 micrograms,” said Tal Zaks, Moderna’s chief medical officer. He said combined with the success in preventing viral replication in the lungs of a pre-clinical challenge model, these data “substantiate our belief that mRNA-1273 has the potential to prevent Covid-19”.

The company said the participants reported no side effects and that the drug was “generally safe and well tolerated”. Haller says other than the usual bruised feeling one has after getting any injection in the arm, she had felt nothing untoward.

Had she not experienced wild, feverish dreams about her teenage crushes?

“No, Nothing good like that,” she says with a laugh. “I mean, it’s hard to parse out really with all the other insanity that’s going on. Because I was stressed. But I think that was that was the same thing that everybody else is going through.”

The two months that Haller, 43, who has two teenage children, Ellie and Hayden, has spent as a lab rat, mark a startling period in the world’s faltering efforts to combat the pandemic.

When she received her first injection on Monday, 18 March – she was the very first person in the US to receive the jab – the total number of infections stood at 218,000 and the death toll had reached 9,000.

This week, those numbers stand at 4.8m infections and 319,000 deaths worldwide. In the United States, there have been 1.5m infections and 90,000 fatalities, the worst of any country.

That period has contained some medical success stories. Officials believe blood plasma from people who have recovered from the coronavirus can help individuals newly infected and are seeking donations. At the same time, the drug remdesivir, designed to treat Ebola, has shown success helping Covid patients.

There have also been setbacks. Abbott Laboratories’s testing machine, which was pushed by Trump and given early approval by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), reportedly has a problem with false positives.

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Ultimately, as even Trump admits, the true game-changer, that most overused of words, would be a vaccine.

Haller says she has lived a life of privilege – friends and family, savings, a good job that has allowed her to participate as a volunteer, a home in the Seattle suburbs. Yet, as for everyone, these times of contagion have not been without challenge.

She says being involved in the trial and participating in something that could help those less fortunate, has helped her stay focused, and reflective. She says she would have been just as proud of herself being part of the trial had it not been successful. But that it was now showing early success, gave people real hope.

“Half of our country was living paycheck to paycheck before the crisis,” she says. Now there is devastation to people’s health and to their incomes.

“It certainly gives me an amazing perspective in the sense that I am able to do something,” she says. “Everybody feels so helpless right now, and while I still feel somewhat helpless, I’m actually doing something. So this is cool.”