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small French study later more or less disowned by
the scientific journal in which it appeared, and what
the then President said was “a feeling.” “I was frus-
trated, as was anybody in the scientific community,
about the ways at times that science was neglected
or overshadowed by political comments or just per-
sonal anecdotes,” Collins says.
Before he was a research scientist, Collins was a
physician, and he diagnosed the country as in need
of some scientific rigor. “It looked as if there were
hundreds of trials on hydroxychloroquine, most of
which were probably too small to give you a cred-
ible result,” he says. “And there were lots of other
very small trials on compounds that people thought,
‘Well, maybe that will work,’ but there was relatively
little in the way of systematic evidence and there was
no prioritization going on. It was crazy.”
Over the next few weeks, Collins contacted the
chief scientific officers of many of the pharmaceu-
tical companies and began to float the idea of an
emergency public- private partnership, like the ones
that had been first created for HIV, then cancer, and
were bubbling along for such diseases as diabetes
and lupus, but bigger and faster. This network, which
came to be called ACTIV (Accelerating COVID-19
Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines), aimed to
streamline and bring discipline to the development
of treatments and vaccines for the virus. “It seemed
like what we really needed to do was to get the aca-
demics and the government and industry all together
and decide we’re going to do something that we’ve
never quite done before in a crisis like this, and that
is prioritize what needs to be done and then do it
and not worry about who’s going to get the credit.”
Mikael Dolsten, chief scientific officer of Pfizer,
got a call about it while his wife was in the hospital
with COVID-19. Even though Pfizer was going to run
its own Phase 3 vaccine trials outside of the Collins
plan, Dolsten encouraged his longtime friend to start
the network. Dolsten sat on the executive committee
and another Pfizer executive co-headed the vaccines
working group. “Francis really brought the world of
academia together to seriously look at how you do
best practice for COVID pandemics,” says Dolsten.
On April 4, nine pharmaceutical companies—
including Moderna, which was the second drugmaker
to get emergency- use authorization from the FDA for
its vaccine, and Johnson & Johnson, which hopes to
apply for it soon—and five government agencies met
to hash out the details. Within two weeks, they had
mapped out the four areas that needed the most in-
tense effort and set up teams for them all, each led by
a representative of industry and of either academia
or the government. “We had a hundred people who
basically agreed they’re going to put their lives on
hold for everything except this,” says Collins.
One of the groups worked on the vaccine, ensur-
ing the trials were efficient while also being rigorous.
It was decided, for example, that each trial needed to
have at least 30,000 participants and they would be
observed for negative side effects for at least 60 days.
The same data-safety board monitored all the trials
from the different vaccine makers, so the standards
for measuring safety and efficacy were consistent.
Another group was looking at possible treat-
ments, both existing medicines that might be
adapted and new approaches that could be super-
charged with funding. That group also had to es-Profile
“
It would
be really
poor
planning
to imagine
that this
is the last
coronavirus
epidemic
that we will
ever see.
”