Ayn Rand once famously wrote about women saying, “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” Rand may well have written these words for this pandemic. That too in a very unusual but critical vertical: C-19 vaccine research.
A number of studies in the mid-2000s revealed that almost 82% of clinical trial principal investigators in the US were men; while the coordinators, who do the really hard day-to-day slog to generate much of the knowledge and insights, were women! The situation is very different in the present scenario as there is at least one woman in a leading role for all the frontrunner Covid vaccines, the vaccine race seems to be largely driven by a powerhouse of women in their 50-60s. The woman most prominent and celebrated in her country: Major General Chen Wei, from the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences, was awarded the People’s Hero title for her leadership roles in phase 3 trial in the development of Sinopharma and CanSino vaccines to stem the Covid-19 outbreak. Then we see the extraordinary achievement of Nawal Al Kaabi, the Chief Medical Officer for the health services in Abu Dhabi, and chair of the country’s Clinical National Committee for Coronavirus, leading the phase 3 trial in United Arab Emirates for Chinese vaccine candidates CoronaVac and SinoVac, recruiting nearly 7,000 people a day. Similarly, Sinopharma’s Argentinian trial had the infectious disease specialist Florencia Cahn as the principal investigator for the Buenos Aires centre. The impressive Head of Survillance and Clinical Trial Division in Indonesia, Novilla Sjafri Bachtiar coordinated the CoronaVac trials in the country. In Canada, Joanne Langely, the co-chair of Cocid-19 task Force was one of the principal investigators in CanSino vaccine international phase3 trial.