DAVIDSON, N.C. — In early December the United States saw a little bit of hope as doctors and nurses across the country received their very first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

What You Need To Know

  • Pfizer was one of the first companies to get vaccine approval

  • Two women from Davidson participated in vaccine trials

  • They don't know if they got the vaccine or a placebo

  • They will continue in the trial for two years

 

Pfizer was one of the first pharmaceutical companies to get vaccine approved by the FDA for use.

But before that could happen, thousands of people had to volunteer for a trial.

Shelley Rigger is a professor at Davidson College and was one of those people who volunteered for the trial.

This whole year has been quite a journey for Rigger, because at the beginning of it she found herself halfway across the world in China watching COVID-19 change everything.

“On January 23, which is the day they closed down the city of Wuhan, I was talking to someone from the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai, and he said, 'we’re not too worried, we think it’s going to be OK,'” she said. “Within four days the advice was 'you gotta get out of here.'”

She took that advice and fled to Taiwan just before they locked down the city.

“All of a sudden everybody’s behind a mask,” she said. “All of a sudden they’re taking your temperature everywhere you go. All of a sudden people have to go into quarantine before they enter the country.”

Rigger was able to finally make it back to North Carolina in March, and months later decided she needed to do something.

“When we signed up for the trial, none of us knew whether it would work or not,” she said.

Over the summer, Rigger decided to participate in the Pfizer vaccine trial in Salisbury.  

Participants were administered two shots, took an antibody test, and multiple COVID-19 tests over the next few months.

“They don’t tell you anything about what their results are,” she said. “I don’t know whether I got the vaccine or the placebo. To this day I don’t know, and I don’t know if I had antibodies or not.”

Annie Porges decided to participate in the same trial as Rigger.

“I think I was looking for something to help us get out of this as soon as possible even though we didn’t know if a vaccine if it would be successful, what was going to help us get out of this I just felt I had to act in some way,” she said.

Ironically, Porges also works at Davidson College and lives just a mile away from Rigger.

Initially, she didn’t want a lot of people to know she did this trial, but with the vaccine finally rolling out to the public, she’s hoping more people will consider taking it.

“People will question, 'you know I wonder about this vaccine, I don’t know if I should get this vaccine' and I say 'well, I signed up for the trial and I feel really good about it,'” Porges said.

While these women are excited to know the end is near, both agree if they had to do it all over again, they would.

“It just felt like I was doing the right thing, and it felt like this little thing that I could carry with me that helped me know that I was just doing something during this whole crisis that would help ease what was going on in any way, and that’s been a very good thing for me,” Porges said.

“To be able to know that they needed this number, and one by one we lined up, and we gave them the numbers that they needed so they could be sure that it works that was really…very…cool,” Rigger said.

Both women are hoping to find out if they were vaccinated during this trial sometime this week.

They, along with the thousands of other participants, will have to go back every six months for the next two years to help doctors complete the research for this trial.