Editorial: Vaccine volunteers are heroic

In the search for a way out of the coronavirus pandemic, there is a lot of attention on the key players.

There are the agencies: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, the Food and Drug Administration, the federal Department of Health and Human Services, the state health departments. There are the hospitals and universities, including the University of Pittsburgh, UPMC and Carnegie Mellon. There are the famous faces: Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Rachel Levine.

But we have reached the stage where everyday faces may be the most important.

On Wednesday, UPMC and Pitt announced the need for at least 750 people to participate in vaccine trials, part of the Operation Warp Speed push for finding a safe, effective way to inoculate the population and stop covid-19 from its deadly and economically devestating advance.

“This is a chance for Pittsburgh to have an impact that’s not just local or national. It’s going to be worldwide,” Dr. Judy Martin, director of the Pittsburgh Vaccine Clinical Trials Unit at UPMC Children’s Hospital, said. “This really allows us to do something that enables us to help.”

Since March, people have made heroes of grocery store workers and fast food employees, nurses and doctors and all of the others who have kept the world spinning in varying degrees of quarantine. They are heroic because of what they were actively doing.

But there’s a different kind of heroism. It’s the kind that comes from volunteering to take the shot.

Someone stepped up and did that for polio when Jonas Salk was developing his groundbreaking vaccine in the 1950s. Because of that, generations of children can walk.

Because people stepped forward, smallpox is something that exists only in labs. The flu doesn’t kill a third of the world’s population every year. Measles, mumps, diptheria, whooping cough, tetanus, chickenpox and shingles, human papilloma virus, hepatitis.

None of them are the common occurrence they once were, and that is largely because of doctors and scientists and research. The importance of that work cannot be overestimated. It is priceless.

But every life saved before, and every life that could be saved from a covid-19 vaccine, has another debt. They are also due to those other people, the names that never will appear on a Nobel Prize. They are because of the people who volunteered.