He appeared on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, “Good Morning America” and “The Today Show.” He spoke with reporters from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, Time, Newsweek, STAT, Medscape, Kaiser Health News, and many more. He appeared numerous times on every local news outlet, answering detailed questions about the science behind the vaccines, debunking myths, discussing which activities were safer than others, and constantly repeating the message that no corners were cut despite the speed of the work.
“If you look at a more typical vaccine trial you’d be sending things in batches,” Frenck told CNN. “For this study, they are saying they need information back in 24 hours. We are cutting out the lag time. Because this is an emergency, we are getting people to work as hard as we can.”
In addition to directing the Gamble Center, Frenck is the principal investigator of the NIH-funded Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Unit (VTEU) at Cincinnati Children’s, one of nine such units nationwide. For years, the VTEU has evaluated annual flu vaccines and has conducted research on a wide range of vaccine candidates for Ebola, MERS, rotavirus, and many other viruses.
As the leader of the pediatric arm, he co-authored Pfizer’s key clinical trial findings, which were published Dec. 10, 2020, in The New England Journal of Medicine. That study became the fourth most-shared paper of more than 2 million studies published in 2020, and the 10th most shared of all papers ever tracked by Altmetric.
The paper was directly cited in more than 2,200 news stories from more than 750 news outlets. It was shared by more than 37,000 Twitter users with a combined 24 million followers. It attracted more than 6,200 readers on Mendeley and has more than 3,400 citations on Dimensions.
The overall Altmetric score for the paper—28796 as of May 16, 2022—set an all-time record for the most-shared paper co-authored by a Cincinnati Children’s faculty member. Its score will continue to climb as more people share or cite the paper in years to come.
Frenck went on to serve as first author in another widely shared paper that focused more specifically on adolescent outcomes of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. This paper, published May 27, 2021, in The New England Journal of Medicine, scored above 7400 on Altmetric and has been shared by Twitter users with nearly 22 million followers.
VACCINE WORK EXTENDED WELL BEYOND PFIZER’S VACCINE
Paul Spearman, MD, director of Infectious Diseases at Cincinnati Children’s, also played a significant national role in COVID-19 vaccine work. He recently completed a four-year term as a member of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which reviews and evaluates vaccine research and makes recommendations to the FDA.