Hall looks for answers following “the way”

There’s a Mandalorian in the dean’s office. Neither long ago nor in a galaxy far, far away, but right here in Charleston, SC, where the dean of the MUSC College of Philip Hall, dean of the College, was in one of the first cohorts of the Astra-Zeneca phase 3 trial conducted at the Medical University of South Carolina. He stepped up as a test subject because he believed this kind of clinical research was the right path to take against the coronavirus.

“It’s like what they say on The Mandalorian,”  he said. “ ‘This is the way.’ The way forward is to conduct research, build on scientific innovation and discovery, and rely on evidence-based medicine. You don’t have evidence-based medicine without clinical trials and you don’t have clinical trials without some risk. But it’s the way to do it. I’ve always believed that and I wanted to do what I could to advance our knowledge.”

The Astra-Zeneca vaccine rolled out its test in August with the plan to enroll and collect data on 30,000 people across 20 cities in the U.S., with as many as 1,500 from Charleston. Other vaccines in Phase 3 clinical trials include Janssen, Moderna, Novavax, and Pfizer.

The way is not always easy. The mantra is usually incited when there is clear conflict between self-interest and doing what should be done. By stepping up as a volunteer for a different clinical trial, Hall is at least temporarily ineligible to get the Pfizer vaccine starting to roll out this week. But it is a small sacrifice compared to the courage and absolute selflessness regarding clinical trials he has seen in the cancer ward, which was one of his inspirations.

“I’ve known many cancer patients who agreed to go on clinical trials, even though they knew the odds of therapeutic benefit were very small,” said Hall, whose clinical specialty is oncology. “They just wanted us as a society to have better answers. We need the answers to COVID-19.”