• Meru Senator Mithika Linturi asked why Kenyans should be used as guinea pigs in vaccines trials.
• WHO has approved a list of 120 vaccine candidates and 10 of these are being injected into people.
Some 200 Kenyans have registered to take an experimental coronavirus vaccine when a trial comes.
Senators were also offered the chance to take part in a trial but declined.
The Kenya Aids Vaccine Initiative director Prof Omu Anzala, who is leading the project, said they are still looking for more volunteers.
"We have engaged communities in the counties and so far 200 participants are ready for the trial," he said yesterday, during a meeting with the Senate Health Committee.
Prof Anzala, also a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, sits in a sub-committee of the Covid-19 national emergency response team.
He said if Kavi gets the ethical approvals to conduct Covid-19 trials in Kenya, they would be ethical.
"We are currently educating people because even if we get all ethical approvals we will still need the consumer buy-in," he said.
"Part of what we're telling them is that you're a volunteer, not a guinea pig," he said, responding to Meru Senator Mithika Linturi, who asked why Kenyans should be used as guinea pigs in vaccines trials.
Kavi is a unit within the department of medical microbiology at the UoN’s college of health sciences.
Since 1998, it has undertaken eight HIV vaccine trials, two drug trials and is currently a few steps behind the Kenya Medical Research Institute in the race for the Covid-19 vaccine.
Kavi’s vaccine research team comprises Prof Anzala, Dr Loice Ombajo, Dr Moses Masika and Dr Marybeth Maritim.
Prof Anzala said no vaccine candidate has been developed in Kenya.
This means the country might allow any of the 120 candidates approved by the World Health Organization.
By Thursday, 10 of these candidates were already in clinical evaluation, which means they are already being injected into people.
Prof Lukoye Atwoli, a Moi University psychiatrist and vice president of the Kenya Medical Association, said a vaccine is first tested in a lab and animals for safety and efficacy.
"There are several stages in laboratory cells, what we call invitro and only when they confirm it's not harmful do they give it to animals and later people to see how it reacts," he said.
Human testing begins with a small safety trial in healthy volunteers, followed by a larger study to find the right dose and get an early read on efficacy. The final stage consists of large-scale testing in thousands of people. Only then would a vaccine developer commit to manufacturing millions of doses.
Prof Anzala said scientists at Kemri have analysed 28 sets of the novel coronavirus genome in Kenya to identify the strain circulating locally.
He said when viruses spread, they can mutate to become less harmful, endemic or even more virulent.
Currently, 90 per cent of all infected Kenyans are asymptomatic.
"But it is still early to tell if it has mutated in Kenya because it is just five months since the disease was reported," he said.
Dr Ahmed Kalebi, the CEO of Lancet Laboratories in Nairobi, said the vaccine tests should not give Kenyans hope that Covid-19 can be eradicated soon.
"The earliest we can get a vaccine is one to two years from now. We should be thinking how can we move on knowing life has to continue," he said.
Health Committee chairman Johnson Sakaja and Linturi said they would not volunteer for the vaccine trial.
(edited by o. owino)