The Importance Of Knowing The Placebo Content In COVID-19 Vaccine Trials

Photo illustrations (Twitter / @ AstraZeneca)

JAKARTA - Research reveals the importance of using a placebo in Phase III COVID-19 vaccine trials. The importance of using a placebo is as important as knowing what an active placebo contains. It is nothing. The placebo is usually filled with certain ingredients that can confuse researchers to measure the effectiveness of the vaccine.

Launching The Conversation, Tuesday, September 22, in a COVID-19 vaccine trial, researchers usually divide volunteers into two groups. One group will receive an active placebo, such as a meningitis or septicamia vaccine filled. The other, the group of those who received the real COVID-19 vaccine, for example the vaccine from the University of Oxford.

The division of the group was done to prevent the volunteers from knowing whether they were getting a placebo or the real vaccine. For that reason, the placebo which is supposed to be an empty drug is filled by certain drugs. The similarity of reactions that arise - usually muscle pain - often makes the two groups unable to distinguish between treatment from placebo and which vaccine directly.

This method is considered by researchers to be so effective because both groups know that they will get the vaccine. Therefore, the volunteers will feel confident to succeed. Meanwhile, if they knew they were getting the placebo alone, they would not want to volunteer. That is why it is so important to disguise which group is given the placebo and which group is the vaccine.

Confusing active placebo

Usually, after a trial, researchers will immediately conclude whether or not a treatment is dangerous. You do this, by looking at the differences in side effects in the vaccine and placebo groups. However, when a study uses an active placebo, researchers can be confused about measuring side effects. This is because active placebos also have various side effects and are similar to the vaccines that were tested.

As a result, testing that is primarily aimed at finding differences will seem vague because they both carry side effects. In other words, researchers will find it difficult to detect differences because the two can cause relatively the same side effects.

For this reason, even if researchers use an active placebo, control of the content in the placebo is very important. This is as important as control over the procedure for administering placebo to the volunteers that are being tested.

Unfortunately, there is no standard for giving a placebo. Later, a new guide must be created to fix this problem. The guidelines are expected to encourage reporting of the ingredients in the placebo.

Through the new guidelines, it is hoped that researchers will be able to obtain more accurate information about the benefits and dangers of the internal treatment that was tested with a placebo. That's where you will see whether the test failed or not.