While working on a research project on Irish folklore at the University of Pennsylvania last fall, Sean Clarke, an Ivy League champion and All-American pole vaulter, found words to live by in Gaelic phrase.
Saol gan eagla
Life without fear
For Clarke the words rang out loud and true like church bells echoing through Dublin on a Sunday morning.
“I loved it right away,” Clarke recalled.
Three words that sum up how Clarke has spent his first 22 years.
If you were a bully targeting your next victim at Sabal Point Elementary or Rock Lake Middle School in Longwood, Florida near Orlando, you had to get through Sean Clarke first. Never mind that he was always the smallest kid in his class. If you were an outcast, lonely, or needed a friend, you found Sean Clarke standing next to you.
“Even when he was a little boy, he did what a man was supposed to do,” said his mother, Kathy Johnson Clarke, an Olympic gymnastics medalist. “He was always the kid who would stand between somebody who may be bullying or in his mind was going to harm another person, he was like ‘boom!’ right in between them right then and he would protect the vulnerable.”
Clarke is standing up again.
With his final collegiate indoor and outdoor seasons and potential world class professional career looming, the Los Angeles-born Clarke has volunteered to take part in a coronavirus human challenge trial in which participants are deliberately exposed to the virus in hopes of speeding up the development of a vaccine and saving thousands, potentially millions of lives.
Clarke in May volunteered through 1DaySooner.org, an online registry looking for participants for a human challenge study, also referred to as a controlled human infection study. In doing so Clarke checked a box that reads “I am interested in being exposed to the coronavirus to speed up vaccine development.”
“To me it seemed like a really smart idea to start putting preparation in place just to start swaying minds because a lot of people I’m sure would be worried about these challenge trials. And I felt being a very healthy, fairly young college athlete, like I was in a good position to possibly provide something,” said Clarke, who graduated from Penn in May with a B.S. in mechanical engineering and applied mechanics. He will compete next winter and spring for Texas A&M where he is in a graduate mechanical engineering program doing research on energy conversion.
After a vaccine is created in a laboratory, it is further developed through pre-clinical evaluations and tested for its safety and efficacy in three phases of clinical trials. Participants in a traditional Phase III trial receive the vaccine candidate or a placebo enabling the drug’s efficacy to be determined by comparing the prevalence of infection in the vaccine placebo groups to show if significantly fewer participants in the vaccine group get infected.
A human challenge trial could expedite approval of a vaccine by months because participants are exposed directly to the coronvirus.
Like a traditional Phase III trial, participants like Clarke would receive a vaccine candidate or placebo. After a period of time for the vaccine to take effect participants would be deliberately exposed to live coronavirus. This process could make it possible to judge a vaccine’s efficacy sooner and with fewer participants than a standard Phase III trials.
Writing in the Journal of Infectious Diseases in March, Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch, Peter Smith from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Rutgers’ Nir Eyal maintained that “every week that vaccine rollout is delayed will be accompanied by many thousands of deaths globally.”
Speeding up the development by one day could save 7,120 lives globally daily, according to 1DaySooner. A three-month reduction could save more than 500,000 lives. A human challenge trial would require approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“If done properly, live coronavirus human challenge trials can be an important way to accelerate vaccine development and, ideally, to save the lives of millions around the world as well as help rescue global economies,” a group of 18 Nobel laureates wrote in a recent letter to Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, this week.
1DaySooner has been working with the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford. The institute, backed by the British government, is developing a vaccine in collaboration with Advent and Merck. Jenner director Adrian Hill told the Spanish Society of Rheumatology this week that clinical trial results could be available in August and September creating the possibility of a vaccine being delivered in October.
Like Lipsitch, Smith and Eyal in their March article, Clarke and 1DaySooner acknowledge the risk of participating in a human challenge trial.
Participants in a human challenge trial would likely be healthy individuals in the age 18 to 25 demographic, said 1DaySooner communications director Abie Rohrig. 1DaySooner currently has 31,254 volunteers from 140 countries.
The mortality rate for both healthy and unhealthy individuals in 20-29 age group infected by coronavirus is one in 3,300, according to the Lancet Journal of Infectious Disease.
“The best care you’ll get is in one of these trials,” Clarke said. “You’re so carefully monitored by a really strong (medical and science professionals). They’ll really keep a close eye on you.”
Kathy Johnson Clarke, who trained at the world-renown SCATS Gymnastics prior to the 1984 Olympic Games, was caught off guard by her son’s decision. Johnson Clarke and her husband, actor Brian Patrick Clarke (“Eight Is Enough,” “General Hospital”) found out about the move when contacted by a reporter this week. After digesting the news it made sense to the couple.
“My immediate reaction was surprise but not,” Johnson Clarke said. “What has defined Sean in life, his whole mission is to do something for the greater good and to do something great. I think he would like to do something great, be great at something but above and beyond all of that that’s important to him is doing something for the greater good.”
Along those lines, Clarke was inspired by a policeman grandfather and an uncle who served with the Marine Corps at the height of the Vietnam War.
“There’s a history of public service (in the family) and I think this is what this would fall under,” said Clarke, who hopes to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation after his pole vaulting career. “I think what’s so scary to people about this COVID crisis, the random of it, how it’s been so hard to predict who will have significant reaction. But there’s been so many times in history where there’s been a call to action, be it World War II where a generation was called to fight for their country and people didn’t even bat an eye at that, and I think it’s because there was a different culture element around it as in people understood what was being signed up for. These were volunteers and we do have a better understanding daily about this COVID crisis and I just feel this mitigates the risk in a lot of ways.”
In volunteering with 1DaySooner, Clarke said he was also inspired by his longtime hero Pat Tillman, the late NFL player, and his father’s potentially coronavirus-related health crisis in April. Tillman turned down a $3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals and enlisted in the U.S. Army months after the terrorists attacks on September 11, 2001. He was later killed by friendly fire while in combat in Afghanistan.
Tillman’s example, Clarke said “definitely occurred to me” when making the decision to volunteer for coronavirus trial.
“What he did was on a far bigger scale and with far more courage but he really always seemed to do the right thing,” Clarke said. “(Enlisting) was something he felt he should do and that’s how I feel about this.”
Brian Patrick Clarke, a former Yale football player, began suffering coronavirus like symptoms as the night of April 1 turned into April 2.
“April Fool’s Day, right,” Brian Patrick Clarke said.
Clarke, 67, is a cancer survivor. He underwent 44 rounds of radiation and five months of hormone treatment after being diagnosed with prostate cancer in May 2018.
“I was very concerned,” he said.
Still Kathy Johnson Clarke was unable to find someone who would test her husband. His 103 degree temperature on April 2 was still at 102 twelve days later. He lost 11 pounds. Finally he was taken the emergency room.
His son drove him.,
“I was going to take Brian and Sean said, ‘No, no I should take him,’” Johnson Clarke recalled. “I said, ‘no I can do it.’ All of sudden Sean goes, ‘Mom, I’m pretty sure I already have it,’ and he goes through the symptoms and now I’m going, so I’m taking him.
“Now I have to send my kid off with my husband and now I’m afraid and I’m worried to death and he comes back after the test and I said, ‘When did you start having symptoms?’ And he said, ‘Mom, I don’t have them, I just told you that because I did not want you to go.’
“And I said,” Johnson Clarke continued, now able laugh at the memory, “‘Damn you, really?’”
Brian Patrick Clarke tested negative coronavirus and was eventually hospitalized with was diagnosed as urosepsis, a severe urinary tract infection.
“That definitely was a big input” in his decision, Sean Clarke said. “It’s really scary when a family has the potential of becoming a broken family in some ways and I think it’s even scarier right now because there’s so little understanding of what’s happening. And I feel if there’s any way to protect even a few families from dealing with that type of loss, especially young children losing these parents suddenly, it’s well worth any slight risk.”
The only real pushback to his decision has come from a source that surprised Clarke: his former Penn teammates.
“I was actually surprised,” he said. “I thought that people would take to it more quickly. There was some pushback actually. I sent it, the link to the website in one of the group chats we have among Penn track team members. I thought everyone would sign up since we’re all in a unique position to be really helpful and people were really surprised that I was so interested in doing it. I don’t understand. There’s risk in everything. Nothing can be guaranteed, but I was surprised at the amount of push back from some of my teammates just thinking it wasn’t a smart idea. ‘Let someone else do it, who’s not at athlete, someone who doesn’t rely so much on their physical health.’ I recognize it is a risk but 1) I really trust the scientific research community that there will be thorough vetting of members who would be interested in doing this and 2) I just feel like every athlete believes in themselves so I don’t believe that I would struggle if the vaccine didn’t work and I were to come down with symptoms. There’s been a number of college athletes diagnosed with COVID, fairly mild symptoms and I just feel like it’s a great opportunity, that we’re in a turning point for society to give back especially to the older generation that has provided so much for us.”
Clarke’s decision to volunteer for a human challenge trial shouldn’t be viewed as a rash move by a young man convinced of his invincibility, a pole vaulting dare devil who sees the coronavirus as just another bar to clear.
Saol gan eagla
He knows that living without fear doesn’t mean living—or dying—recklessly.
“I think it’s important to realize that some of the strength comes from fear,” he said. “It can be used, it’s good that pole vaulters recognize there’s an element of danger. There’s always a little bit of fear.
“I just really like the idea of it being a goal to live a life without fear with the understanding that it always creeps in. It’s how you manage it.”