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This article is sponsored by HERO-TOGETHER, a paid, prospective, observational study of 20,000 adult U.S. health care workers who received a COVID-19 vaccine within the past 60 days.
With over 27 million cases and 470,000 deaths reported to the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC), the COVID-19 pandemic continues to hold a grim grip on the U.S. However, the arrival of vaccines provides a path forward and timeline to a return of pre-pandemic living. To date, over 46 million people have received at least one vaccine dose in the U.S.
Vaccines will only help the country return to normalcy if shots actually get into arms. For some, the decision to be vaccinated is straightforward — they are all in or all out. However, for others in the middle, the so-called “vaccine-hesitant,” the decision is less clear. The Word Health Organization (WHO) describes vaccine hesitancy as a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite the availability of options.
People who are vaccine-hesitant fall along a spectrum. Some may accept but have doubts or accept but want to delay their decision, while others are declining while seeking additional information about long-term safety. People on the fence are often open to education about the role of vaccines in eradicating disease, developing vaccines, testing vaccines in clinical trials, and results from post-vaccine surveillance programs.
Impact of hesitancy on vaccine rollout
Vaccine hesitancy can have a negative impact on rollout. A striking example comes from long-term care facilities. As noted in the February 1, 2021 issue of the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, approximately 78 percent of residents received a vaccine. In contrast, only 37 percent of staff members agreed to be vaccinated. Reasons for refusal include:
- perceived rapidity of vaccine development
- inadequate information received about vaccine safety, side effects, and administration
- skepticism regarding the clinical trials and vaccine approval process
The HERO Research program found similar results from polling health care workers in late 2020. Results from a poll in October found that about 46 percent of participants reported some degree of vaccine hesitancy. An overwhelming majority of respondents who reported hesitancy indicated they had concerns about safety of the COVID-19 vaccine in particular. Very few noted they were concerned about the safety of vaccines in general. The poll was repeated in late November after promising top-line results from Pfizer and Moderna. The second poll showed lower rates of vaccine hesitancy, suggesting that additional evidence may have boosted confidence and willingness.
HERO-TOGETHER
HERO-TOGETHER is a paid, prospective, observational study of 20,000 adult U.S. health care workers who received a COVID-19 vaccine within the past 60 days. A “health care worker” is defined as anyone who currently works in a place where individuals receive health care. Health care workers include clinicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, environmental services workers, as well as EMS providers, paramedics, and first responders.
After self-enrolling, HERO-TOGETHER participants answer brief surveys online over two years. Participants provide information on how they are doing, if they have been hospitalized or experienced any medical events since receiving their vaccine, and if they test positive for COVID-19.
Impact of post-authorization surveillance
The safety data from phase three clinical trials were very encouraging, with very few adverse events. However, the data submitted to obtain emergency use authorization were limited to a two-month period after vaccine. Long-term studies can help us evaluate outcomes beyond that period to ensure there are no other safety signals that require further investigation.
Another key reason to continue post-authorization surveillance is that populations enrolled in clinical trials are not always representative of who ends up receiving a vaccine. For example, women who are pregnant and breastfeeding were excluded from the initial clinical trials of vaccines. Studies such as HERO-TOGETHER performed in real-world settings can help us build safety information for these groups not included in pre-authorization research.
Results from HERO-TOGETHER can also be used to understand how different people — including men, women, older people, people with chronic diseases, and people from different race and ethnic groups — do after vaccination. The HERO research team is committed to sharing study updates and learnings with the participants and the public.
Role of health care workers in building vaccine confidence
From working on the front lines to working behind the scenes, people in health care and public service have joined together with unprecedented focus to fight COVID-19. As the first to receive vaccines against COVID-19, health care workers continue to lead the way through the pandemic and are considered trusted figures in our communities.
HERO-TOGETHER leverages the HERO Registry, which began in April 2020 and is now a community of more than 23,000 health care workers sharing their voices about their experiences and perspectives living and working in the pandemic.
Participate in HERO-TOGETHER
HERO-TOGETHER is an opportunity for people working in health care to continue the fight against COVID-19. HERO-TOGETHER participants will receive learnings and study updates, and compensation for their time. Taking part is an easy way to help fight COVID-19 and learn how to keep our communities and families healthy and virus-free.
Signup at heroesresearch.org/together
Emily O’Brien is an epidemiologist, an associate professor in population health sciences at Duke University School of Medicine, and a faculty member of the Duke Clinical Research Institute. Emily is also the principal investigator of the HERO-TOGETHER study.
Jessica Mega is co-founder and chief medical and scientific officer at Verily. Verily’s mission is to develop the infrastructure and solutions to harness the profusion of health information for good. Their data-driven solutions across research, care, and innovation aim to improve the well-being of our communities.
Image credit: Shutterstock.com
Transcript
Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today we have a special sponsored episode. Emily O’Brien is an epidemiologist, an associate professor in population health sciences at Duke University School of Medicine, and a faculty member of the Duke Clinical Research Institute. Emily is also the principal investigator of the HERO-TOGETHER study. Jessica Mega is co-founder and chief medical and scientific officer at Verily. Verily’s mission is to develop the infrastructure and solutions to harness the profusion of health information for good. Their data-driven solutions across research, care, and innovation aim to improve the well-being of our communities. They’re here today to talk about HERO-TOGETHER, an opportunity for people working in health care who receive a COVID-19 vaccine to help the public understand how people do after vaccination. Emily and Jessica, welcome to the show.
Emily O’Brien: Thanks for having us.
Jessica Mega: Thanks so much.
Kevin Pho: So first off, I’m interested in hearing both your stories and your journeys to where you are today. Emily, why don’t you go first?
Emily O’Brien: Sure, thanks, Kevin. I’m an epidemiologist and, as you mentioned, an associate professor at Duke. I came to Duke as a postdoc at the Duke Clinical Research Institute and still do a lot of research there, but my faculty position is in population health sciences, which is a relatively new department here at Duke. I was a psych major in college, so I’ve always been interested in how behavior and social factors impact decision-making around health. So COVID has been a really interesting time from a research perspective. Early on in the pandemic, there were, of course, a lot of unknowns about transmission, risk, outcomes, and best prevention strategies. And what do scientists do when there are unknowns? We collect data.
So I was so excited to hear about this opportunity, this new research project called HERO, that would look at COVID-related burden in health care workers. Most of my excitement was really not only that we were addressing critical questions related to risk factors and outcomes, and that those outcomes were broader than just infection rates and also encompassed psychological impacts like burnout, but also that we’d be doing this work in a population that was really critical to successfully managing the pandemic and had high risk for infection themselves. So it was, I think, a really nice opportunity to get involved with some really impactful research, and I’ve really enjoyed it so far.
Kevin Pho: I’m certainly looking forward to hearing more about the study and the findings later in the interview. Jessica, please share your journey and story to where you are today.
Jessica Mega: Sure, thanks. I’m a cardiologist. I’ve had the very good fortune of taking care of patients both at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Mass General, and now currently at Stanford Health Care. I think throughout the entire journey, it’s really been important to think about best patient outcomes, and the only way we improve outcomes is by generating the right evidence, whether it’s a new medicine, which we’ll be talking about today, a new device or digital tool, or even a care pathway. I found that one way of trying to improve patient outcomes was thinking about how you bring together new technologies and health care. It was with that in mind that I ended up joining Google, and at the time, we were inside of Google X. We had teams of engineers and scientists and physicians coming together and trying to think about how we could bring these different disciplines and apply them in a way that would go back to improving patient outcomes and really making both the patient and the clinician journey as powerful and as meaningful as it could be. With that in mind, we actually ended up forming a company under Alphabet called Verily. So we spun out, and we focus solely on this intersection of technology, health care, and life science.
One of the main programs that we’ve been working on is called Project Baseline, and it’s this idea of how you democratize research, how you make it easier for people to participate in research, and building the tools that streamline research and ultimately lead to the best data. So it was really fortunate that we were able to take these kinds of initiatives that we’ve been working on now for years and apply them to work during the pandemic. We’ve been involved in screening and testing programs, as well as the work we’ll talk about today, which is really core: How do you reach out to people and understand the vaccines, certainly as they’re going through phase 2 and phase 3 programs, but now, importantly, in this post-market era? So it’s been a real journey. I think this has been a traumatically hard year for everyone, but I think being part of the solution has also been rewarding, particularly the fact that we’re working with health care workers, which I think is something that Emily and I both feel so passionate about.
Kevin Pho: So for the first part of this interview, I want to talk about the COVID vaccine and the concept of vaccine hesitancy. Jessica, we’re speaking in the middle of February now. What is the current status of the COVID vaccines in the United States?
Jessica Mega: So the United States certainly is working very hard to vaccinate the vast majority of the population. We know that this is even more critical as new variants are being discovered. Vaccinations in the United States started in mid-December, and as of today, according to the CDC, we have 46.4 million doses that have been administered, and 11.2 million people have now had both doses, so the doses where we feel that they are considered fully vaccinated. The current status is about 1.6 million doses of the vaccine per day, with the idea of continuing to ramp this up, because we know that in order to get to the goal of having the majority of individuals vaccinated, we’re going to have to continue to work extremely hard to get that done.
Kevin Pho: So the concept of vaccine hesitancy is not new. On my podcast and my blog, we talk about vaccine hesitancy all the time with older, more traditional vaccines. Now, Emily, what is vaccine hesitancy in your eyes, and can you just give it some context in light of the COVID-19 vaccines?
Emily O’Brien: So I really like the World Health Organization’s definition of vaccine hesitancy, which is a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccination services. When we look at overall vaccination rates, of course, that’s a combination of both how much vaccine is available as well as the number of people who decide to become vaccinated. I think what’s really important to recognize about vaccine hesitancy is that it’s not as simple as just a yes or no, a pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine. It’s really a spectrum. On one side of the spectrum, you have people who accept all vaccines almost no matter what, and on the other side, you might have people who refuse all vaccines no matter what. The vaccine-hesitant population is the group in the middle. These are people who might be accepting of vaccines but have a little bit of doubt, people who accept vaccines but want to take a wait-and-see approach and delay, or people who might accept some vaccines but not all. So really, when we think about ways to improve uptake, we’re focusing on this middle group of people who are open to changing their minds about taking the vaccine, but it might take some education to do that.
Interestingly, in HERO, we were really curious about how this looked in this health care worker population. The initial thinking was that health care workers might be more open to medical innovation than the general population, more familiar with the approval process. They’re trusted figures in their communities. They may look a little bit more vaccine-willing than the general population. So we did a quick poll to check on this in October that looked pretty similar to how a lot of the national polls around this issue have looked, really a simple question: If a vaccine were available to you at no cost, would you take it, yes or no? What we saw was that about 46 percent of people at the time, in October, said no. We asked them why, with a very short list of reasons why they might be vaccine-hesitant, and the overwhelming majority said that they had concerns about the safety of this vaccine in particular. Very few said, “I’m vaccine-hesitant in general,” or “I’m concerned about the safety of vaccines in general.”
But interestingly, we did repeat that poll. November was a crazy time here in the U.S. We had a national election where the response to COVID and next steps were very high on everyone’s agenda and an active area of discussion. Pfizer and Moderna also had top-line results that were published in the news media that were really encouraging. So we were curious to see how this changed, and when we conducted this exact same poll in late November, we saw an absolute increase in willingness of about 22 percent. So I think the good news here is that even in populations where there’s some degree of hesitancy, as we saw, people can change their minds, even without an explicit intervention, if they’re shown data that are encouraging.
Kevin Pho: And Emily, will you talk about the vaccine hesitancy spectrum? Where do health care workers fall in that spectrum, and contrast that with the public.
Emily O’Brien: Yeah, so from our data, we actually saw pretty good consistency with the general public. I’ll also say that we looked at the data by professional roles. We have a very broad definition of health care worker: It’s anyone who works in a setting where people receive health care. So we had people who were in direct clinical care roles responding to the poll, as well as people who were in administrative capacities, transport, EMS, food services, et cetera. What we saw was that there was a ton of variation by role. Physicians and paramedics, EMS personnel, tended to be more vaccine-willing. On the other side, nurses tended to be less vaccine-willing. So I think there’s a big range within our definition of health care worker. And as I mentioned, there’s a lot of variability even over time. From month to month, you take these snapshots, and they’re helpful when grouped together in terms of getting an overall picture, but I don’t think there’s any one right answer at any point in time for how people are feeling. It’s important to really keep gathering data.
Kevin Pho: And Jessica, what are some ways that we can overcome vaccine hesitancy, both in patients and in health care workers?
Jessica Mega: I think what we’re seeing across the board is: What are the challenges, or what are the barriers, to vaccines broadly? And everyone in the world is watching this. So there are the vaccine supplies, and when we think about it, it’s not just the vaccines; it’s the cold storage and the syringes and needles and distribution. This is no small task, but I actually think there’s been a lot of progress on that front, or people are talking about that. And in some ways, I think that starts to bring the other two pieces along. We need people to deliver the vaccines, and there are now channels for more and more people, including many, many people in health care who may not normally deliver vaccines, to step up and do this kind of work.
And then there are the people themselves, the individuals. When we look at the top reasons why people may have vaccine hesitancy, we start to see things like: Is this going to be safe? Do people understand the long-term safety? That’s something that Emily and I have been working a lot on, particularly with the HERO-TOGETHER program. People are interested: How do we know not only what happens in the short run but what happens in the long run? Again, that’s another thing that we’ve been working on. When it really comes down to it, it’s the long-term information.
And I think the final thing I would say is that over time, what we’re starting to see is that if people who get the vaccine talk more publicly about it, not just the side effects, but people who talk about maybe their severe side effects, people who may have even had symptoms that we know feel flu-like, the more open people are with discussing the vaccines, I think the more it becomes a collective piece of information. So again, on this vaccine hesitancy side, it’s something that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, because these are real concerns. But I think with evidence and information, we as health care workers can make a huge difference, not only for our own community but, I think, for the broader community, as you start to think about teachers and you start to think about other frontline workers. It’s a real opportunity.
Kevin Pho: For the next part, I certainly want to hear more about the HERO-TOGETHER study. So Emily, what is HERO-TOGETHER?
Emily O’Brien: HERO-TOGETHER is a prospective, observational study of health care workers in the United States who’ve received a COVID vaccine in the past 60 days. It’s been a really wonderful partnership, as Jess mentioned, really thinking about how we can take research to people and make the barrier to getting involved with research in this post-vaccine space pretty low, so that it’s accessible regardless of where people are in the country. It should be relatively simple to join, just from a smartphone, something that most people have access to. As I mentioned, for our population, the health care worker definition is very broad. We really want to make sure that our results are generalizable to a very diverse group of people, and that’s maybe slightly different from where a lot of other COVID-related research in health care workers is focusing, which is primarily on the front line. So acknowledging that vaccines can benefit the entire health care worker community, we wanted that to be part of the study design.
People self-enroll online, so as I mentioned, you can enroll from a smartphone. All of the surveys can be completed online; there’s no in-person visit required. Essentially, people sign up, and we ask them how they’re doing, if they’ve been hospitalized, if they’ve received any unplanned medical care, and if they’ve tested positive for COVID, and we check in with them over time to make sure that we’re able to see any outcomes in this post-vaccine period.
Kevin Pho: By the end of this year, there could be as many as four to five different COVID-19 vaccines. Emily, why is it important to keep studying vaccines even after authorization?
Emily O’Brien: This is a critical question that comes up a lot, and Jess already touched a little bit on this. But really, we see two key reasons why this is very important. The first is related to timing, and the second is related to the populations that have been studied so far. As we all know, the safety data from phase 3 trials for the two vaccines that are currently being used were very encouraging, and there were very few adverse events in the vaccinated population from those trials. But those data were limited at the time of EUA review to a two-month period after being vaccinated. So as Jess mentioned, long-term studies are really central to addressing concerns about any long-term safety outcomes beyond that initial short-term post-vaccine period, and really to making sure that we can investigate any safety signals that come up in the period beyond the clinical trial period.
The second reason, which I see as equally important, is really common to any evidence that’s generated from clinical trials, which is that those populations tend to be more narrow than populations in the real world where these therapies are being used. So acknowledging that there might be differences in patient characteristics between who is included in the trials versus not, really studying these long-term outcomes in broad, diverse groups is an important way to address some of these evidence gaps. The example that we point to often for HERO-TOGETHER specifically is pregnant and breastfeeding women. This was a population that was excluded from both the Moderna and Pfizer phase 3 trials. We can capture data as women make decisions about vaccination and either become pregnant or already are pregnant at the time of vaccination. Finding out how they’re doing over time is going to be really critical, I think, to enhancing confidence, given that at the time of the EUA approval, this is really a data-free zone.
Kevin Pho: Emily, how is the HERO Registry being used?
Emily O’Brien: HERO-TOGETHER is building on an existing community of health care workers, which is the HERO Registry. This is a PCORI-funded project that launched in April 2020, where health care workers respond to surveys about their experiences and perspectives related to COVID-19. We ask questions about if they’ve been tested and if they’ve received positive tests. We have some data that we capture on quality of life, burnout, and other psychosocial outcomes like depression. We have a few different analyses that are ongoing related to employment characteristics and outcomes: Is there a different risk, for example, of COVID depending on the setting where the health care worker is working, hours worked per week, etc.? We also have an ongoing study on race and ethnicity and outcomes, given some of the reports of disparities, racial disparities, in COVID-19. So there’s active scientific work that’s coming from that registry, and it’s also an important opportunity for us to connect with registered participants, let them know about HERO-TOGETHER, and invite them to participate.
Kevin Pho: Jessica, why specifically focus on health care workers?
Jessica Mega: Health care workers have been at the forefront of this pandemic from the start. And I think that health care workers, and again, it’s a very broad definition of health care workers, include people who are working on the floors with patients who may be COVID-positive, nurses, physicians, and respiratory therapists, a very broad group of people who have had to come together and really be part of the solution. And as we thought about what individuals we really want to hear from, we think about it this way: When someone gets a vaccine, sometimes they don’t know who’s following them. They don’t know that there’s a safety net, that there’s a group of people looking to make sure that the best evidence is there. And that’s the whole goal of HERO-TOGETHER, following individuals who have received the vaccine. But again, because health care workers have been on the forefront of the solution, it’s that same spirit of engaging with them. It’s almost an obligation to make sure that health care workers are part of this very generalized study.
I think Emily said it so nicely. I’ve spent much of my life conducting phase 3 clinical trials, and there’s a huge role for that, understanding the efficacy, understanding the safety. But when you start to think about the millions of people who are going to be vaccinated, the millions of health care workers and the millions of people broadly, we need to get a group of individuals so that we know the data is applicable and we know that we’re doing the right thing. So I think health care workers have been champions on the forefront for the last year, and it’s another place, I think, where one can contribute, but we also get the knowledge back to these individuals. As I said, I think it’s an obligation that we have.
Kevin Pho: You’re listening to a special sponsored episode of The Podcast by KevinMD. Emily O’Brien is an epidemiologist and an associate professor in population health sciences at Duke University School of Medicine, and Jessica Mega is co-founder and chief medical and scientific officer at Verily. They’re here to talk about HERO-TOGETHER, an opportunity for people working in health care who receive a COVID-19 vaccine to help the public understand how people do after vaccination. Emily, you’ve been polling health care workers throughout the pandemic. What are some of the things that you’ve learned?
Emily O’Brien: Yeah, so I’ll say that COVID has thrown a wrench in the way that we typically do clinical research. I mean, we really like to have a set approach to data collection and for that to stay the same over the course of the project, and things change much more quickly in the era of COVID. So recognizing that, we wanted to put in place a mechanism where we could hear from health care workers on an ongoing basis about topics that everyone was talking about. In addition to some of the vaccine hesitancy data that I mentioned, which was one of our early polls, we have also asked health care workers about financial burden. This is data that we’ve analyzed really within the past week or so, and we’ve seen some interesting things. From this poll, 34 percent of health care workers reported that they were more worried about meeting financial obligations now than in the pre-pandemic era, about a quarter reported reduced income, and about 18 percent reported reduced work hours. So this is a topic that’s gotten, I think, a little bit less attention than infection rates and psychological impacts. But what we’re finding is that the burden of COVID really extends beyond some of the more proximal effects that we’re seeing, with financial burden being one of those.
We also asked health care workers in the fall, if they were a parent or guardian, whether school or daycare changes had impacted their ability to work, and we had some very basic, high-level things that we asked about, being distracted, anxious, et cetera. We saw quite a bit of burden here too, so 28 percent said that they were more distracted at work, about a quarter said that they were more anxious, and 15 percent said they were struggling with child care issues. And importantly, we did see some racial and ethnic disparities here too: more burden of anxiety and more distraction reported in Hispanic and Latinx participants, relative to non-Hispanic participants. So I think it’s really important for us both to be agile enough to capture these data and then to really disseminate them widely, so that there’s a better understanding of the diverse ways that this pandemic is affecting such an important population.
Kevin Pho: How can the data from HERO-TOGETHER help build vaccine confidence at the individual level and at a community level?
Jessica Mega: I think across the board, people have been thinking about how you think about the individual, with personalized care and personalized health, and then also thinking about community and population impact. When we think about it on the individual level here, there are millions of people getting vaccinated, and they may not know how or where to share their own journey. In some cases, it may be that they had a very smooth sail. There may be other cases where it’s critically important to understand and share their event. This is a way to be personally heard, and we hear that from people once they’ve learned what’s going on, the number of people who say, “I didn’t know where to contribute and where to think about this longer-term data.” So I think on an individual level, we’re getting incredibly positive feedback.
On a community level, it’s so important, because, and we talk about this in medicine all the time, and I think you’ll relate to this, we think about a case in front of us, and we treat that individual. But really, when we practice medicine just case by case, we don’t really understand the totality. We don’t know what’s really going on or the frequency of given events at a broader level. I think it’s only through these kinds of community-based efforts, where we’re all collectively coming together, that we end up practicing the best medicine. So I think that there are both individual benefits as well as community benefits here, and it’s really, I think, very fortunate when we see these two things come together.
Kevin Pho: Why should health care workers join HERO-TOGETHER?
Jessica Mega: So I think health care workers are actually really proud of being vaccinated. They have needed to go and put themselves on the front lines. I think many people have had some of the most rewarding times in their careers, and again, it’s a very broad definition of health care workers, as we’ve already discussed, but it’s also been really tough. We see people, we see the selfies out there, and we celebrate each other for the ability to be vaccinated, and I think joining HERO-TOGETHER is just that next step. We’ve worked really hard to bring down the barriers to getting into this evidence-generation community, and I think with that in mind, this is the next step of being part of the solution. So congratulations to everyone who’s been getting vaccinated, and now is a moment to make sure that you’re followed and you’re heard in this health care community called HERO, and particularly in HERO-TOGETHER. So that’s the way I think about it.
Kevin Pho: Emily, after joining, what exactly is involved, and what is the commitment?
Emily O’Brien: So after joining, we’ll send emails to participants to ask them to complete short surveys to tell us how they’re doing, again, any health events that they’ve experienced and some basic details about their event. We’re also collecting some information on quality of life and fatigue over time, again so we can hopefully characterize some of this additional burden that health care workers are experiencing. The surveys are clustered together every few weeks to start, and then they spread out over time, so it’s every few months after that, and then in the second year, it’s just three surveys that they complete. For most people who haven’t had any unplanned care, the surveys will be really quick and easy. Participants are also compensated for their time. And as Jess mentioned, it’s really important for us to share results as we go, to let people know what we’re learning and how their data are being used, so that they can really see the contribution that they’re making at the aggregate level.
Kevin Pho: And on average, how long does it take to complete a survey?
Emily O’Brien: For most people, it really should be 5 to 10 minutes over follow-up. We do collect a little bit more detailed information at the enrollment survey, just to make sure that we understand the setting where people work and any past medical history that might be relevant. But again, for most people who haven’t had any unexpected care or hospitalizations, anything like that, it’s just a really quick check-in.
Kevin Pho: For those interested in joining, how can you do that?
Emily O’Brien: So people can go to heroesresearch.org, that’s heroesresearch, one word, .org, and look for the link to HERO-TOGETHER. As I mentioned, sign-up’s all online, and everything is through our website, so it’s heroesresearch.org.
Kevin Pho: Wonderful. So I want to end this interview with a take-home message from each of you. Jessica, we’ll start with you. What’s your take-home message that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?
Jessica Mega: Being a health care worker over the last year has, I think, put people in some of the most trying but some of the most rewarding opportunities they’ve ever had. And it’s now our time to continue that. There just has never been a more important moment to be part of research, to be part of the vaccination, to be part of the long-term study, and to join HERO-TOGETHER.
Kevin Pho: And Emily, what is your take-home message that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?
Emily O’Brien: Jess, that was perfect. I would also just add a thank you. Thank you for everything that you’ve done over the past year, and we can’t wait to hear from you, so please join us.
Kevin Pho: Wonderful. Well, thanks to both of you for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.
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