 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.

