This week, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) showed that the vaccines’ effectiveness may vary depending on a person’s race, and said that the vaccines should be tested robustly across populations with diverse genetic backgrounds.
Using advanced machine learning AI methods that examined a form of vaccine similar to Moderna and Pfizer’s, the team found that the number of people whose cellular immune system is not predicted to robustly respond to the vaccine ranged from less than half of one percent of white participants to nearly 10 percent of Asian participants. (Participants self-reported their race.)