Vaccine expert Dr Frances Priddy is leading a clinical study to find out how effective the Pfizer vaccine is among Māori and Pasifika populations.
Priddy is the director of Vaccine Alliance Aotearoa New Zealand and has more than 20 years of experience in emerging infectious disease vaccine development, including HIV, TB, and Ebola.
“One of the reasons we’re doing our study is to find out, are there any difference between Māori and also the Pacific populations in New Zealand and those that were included in international studies that were originally done of the vaccine.”
She says Māori and Pacific peoples were not included in the first trials of the vaccine.
“So we’re not really able to say upfront ‘you’re population was included in this large trial’, and I think that’s another piece of evidence that people would like to see. So this study will be providing the confirmatory information to make people feel even more confident about the vaccine.”
Priddy says there is really no reason to think immune responses or safety issues are going to be different in Māori people in particular.
“Your immune system is created by two factors. One is what you inherited but also importantly your environment and what you’re exposed to as you develop. So they’ve actually found, genetically, different ethnicities really don’t differ much if you’re looking into the genetic makeup. About 99.9 percent of our genes are similar to all humans. So ethnicity is probably more of a social construct. Your immune response should respond very similarly to this vaccine.”
However, she says the prevalence of diseases in Māori populations such as diabetes and obesity can influence the ability for Māori to have a high immune response.
“It’s really not the ethnicity, it’s really the prevalent condition in your community. So that’s what we’ll be looking at in this study too, do people with diabetes obesity and different age groups have different immune responses.”