DECEMBER 31 • 2020 | 15
F
or almost a year now, Dr. Larry
Corey has been working nonstop to
design clinical trials for several dif-
ferent COVID-19 vaccines.
Corey — who is based in Seattle but
grew up in the Detroit area — is currently
serving as head of the operations center
for the COVID-19 Prevention Network,
a national group of researchers from aca-
demic institutions and the private sector
tasked with addressing the
need for vaccines against
COVID-19.
He built his career research-
ing HIV and is the principal
investigator of the HIV Vaccine
Trials Network, an interna-
tional effort to develop an HIV
vaccine based at Fred Hutchinson Cancer
Research Center in Seattle.
Corey has worked closely with Dr.
Anthony Fauci on HIV research for more
than 20 years. (The two are so close that
Corey planned to attend Dr. Fauci’s surprise
Zoom birthday party right after his call with
the Jewish News this weekend.)
Late last winter, Fauci called him to ask
if he would help develop clinical trials to
assess the new vaccines that would have to
be created to control the virus.
Since then, the world-renowned virologist
has Zoomed three times a week with Fauci
and taken Operation Warp Speed meetings
on the other days. He’s on calls from 5:30
a.m. until 6 p.m. most of the week, then
answers emails until late at night.
His days are still long and busy, but he’s
been able to relax a bit since the trials got
up and running over the summer, he said.
“It all happened, and it happened incredi-
bly quickly with incredible, unprecedented
speed.
”
Corey and his team were able to put
together the infrastructure to amass 100
clinical trial sites per vaccine program, and
then design each trial.
“It’s been sort of an amazing journey,
” he
said. “I can sort of smile at it now. I certainly
wasn’t that way in April, in May, in June,
when you sort of had on anxiety about …
could we pull this off?”
So far, the vaccines have actually been
much more successful than Corey imagined
they’
d be — they designed the clinical trials
for 50% effectiveness, and 75% would have
been great, he said. He never thought they’
d
get multiple vaccines to 95% effective in less
than a year.
“It’s amazing, when you don’t
resource-constraint science, what science
can do,
” he said. “Science has delivered in
an unbelievable way. I hope the American
people understand that.
”
DETROIT ROOTS
Though Corey has lived in Seattle for the
last four decades, he still has strong ties to
his hometown of Detroit.
He grew up in Oak Park and attended
Oak Park High School. The Jewish News
was “the most important newspaper that
came to my parents’ house,
” he said. Corey
met his wife at Tamarack while they were
staff members and was one of the first
campers in the Pioneer program, back when
they slept in hammocks strung from trees.
Later, Corey attended University of
Michigan for college, medical school and his
medical residency.
He became interested in virology by
chance, he said, when he was placed at the
Centers for Disease Control during the
Vietnam War draft. At the CDC, he was
assigned to the viral disease division.
“
At that time, I was planning to be a cardi-
ologist, coming back to Detroit,
” he said. But
at the CDC, he began to work on an out-
break of influenza in children, and “I sort of
got hooked on viruses,
” he told JN.
Corey took his family to Seattle after his
time at the CDC so he could continue to
work on infectious disease research. Forty
years later, he and his family still love the
Pacific Northwest, though Corey credits
a lot of his formation as a scientist with
growing up in Detroit.
“Those years I spent at Camp Tamarack
as a counselor and administrator where ...
I learned actually to manage people and
actually administer — a lot of that skill
actually built these huge administrative
programs that I have set up,” he said,
referring to the AIDS clinical trials group,
working on an HIV vaccine and now the
COVID vaccine trials.
Though the COVID-19 Prevention
Network has made incredible progress
with the vaccines in such a short amount
of time, there’s still lots of work to be
done, Corey said. Several vaccines are
still in the development and trial stage,
plus there’s a global vaccine shortage that
needs to be fixed, and many people in the
U.S. that are suspicious of the vaccine.
To that last point, Corey says people need
to make their own decisions, but that he
is extremely confident in the vaccines that
have been approved so far.
“If you are at risk of COVID-19, the risk
benefit ratios on these vaccines are enor-
mous,
” he said. “I have no reservations; we
didn’t cut any corners here. They’ve been
thoroughly evaluated.
”
IN
THED
JEWS
Dr. Larry
Corey
Virologist credits Detroit upbringing
with skills he used to expedite vaccine.
MAYA GOLDMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
The Man Behind the
COVID-19 Vaccine Trials
“IT HAPPENED INCREDIBLY QUICKLY WITH
INCREDIBLE, UNPRECEDENTED SPEED.”
— DR. LARRY COREY
A nurse prepares to administer a COVID-19 vaccine
in Truro, United Kingdom, Dec. 9, 2020.