Meet the humble doctor who put Cincinnati at the forefront of COVID-19 vaccine trials
CINCINNATI — The little boy with orange hair and a spray of freckles adorning his face walked into the basketball gymnasium at his mother’s side to see a winding line of people and long tables and nurses in white uniforms.
Bobby, 5, stepped forward when it was his turn.
“The first nurse handed me a little white cup.”
“The second nurse dropped a sugar cube in the cup.”
“The third nurse put three drops of liquid into the cup.”
“I asked my mom, ‘What’s this?’ ”
She said, “’Don’t worry, just take it.’”
Later, she explained he'd been given polio vaccine.
It was a big day for Bobby Frenck.
And as he recounts the experience of 61 years ago, Dr. Robert Frenck realizes something he's never thought about before: The polio vaccine was his first connection, however vague, to vaccine research at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. That's where the live oral polio vaccine was developed in 1960, which, the hospital notes, amplified early gains against polio that were made with an injected vaccine.
And for the past 16 months, Frenck has been at the helm of clinical trials in that same vaccine research center, helping make possible another type of inoculation: COVID-19 vaccine.
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Frenck is director of the Gamble Center for Vaccine Research at Cincinnati Children’s in the city's Avondale neighborhood. His team of more than 50 includes nurses, pharmacists, physicians, lab techs and clinical research associates.
The center houses one of just nine National Institutes of Health-funded Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Units in the country. Frenck communicates with infectious disease experts around the world and works with young doctors as they learn the specialty.
It was Frenck who hit the go button that pushed the research center into a nationwide focal point of COVID-19 pandemic vaccine clinical trials. His nod came in April 2020, just after COVID-19 erupted in the Cincinnati area, and it was, for the Cincinnati Children’s vaccine center, the beginning of a string of clinical trials that would include adults, adolescents and young children, immunocompromised patients and others.
Jumping in was not a popular idea among some of his team members at first, Frenck says.
“I got a lot of flak for it,” he says. “They wanted to go home.”
“They were asking, ‘Why are you making us stay?’ There were people that were angry with me.”
He understands: “It was that original shock. It’s an emotional response.”
“I told them, ‘We need to be going to work. This is what we train for. This is what our job is. We’ll be OK.’ ”
Frenck, who went to medical school on a Navy scholarship, used his military training to lead his staff.
"He was very calm and conveyed to us what an important role we would be playing in history," says Michelle Dickey, operations director of the vaccine research center.
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The team had daily meetings to coordinate activities, she says, "and these continue to today." They worked 10- to 12-hour days, seven days a week, for months. Dickey says Frenck's leadership skills, his military background, his dedication to precision were all evident.
Frenck has likened the pandemic to a war. There have been victories, like this big one: It came via a phone call he received in November. The caller was a Pfizer physician.
"They had results: The vaccine was 95% effective," he recalls. “It felt like the world had been removed from my shoulders. I thought, ‘Thank God. There is an end in sight.' "
"We had no idea that the vaccines were going to work," he states plainly.
Frenck is not all orders and follow-through, despite that military background. Nor does he seek affirmation for vaccine accomplishments. He credits his team for the work, often including nurses in research manuscripts. He credits Cincinnati-area residents, who routinely raise their hands to get into vaccine trials. During the pandemic, about 1,400 of them, ages 6 months to 86 years, made the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials possible.
Into the fray
His childhood, particularly high school in southern California, helps explain the adult he has become.
Frenck was not among the most popular kids at school.
“I would have considered myself the nerd. Doing math and doing science,” he says. “I was in the marching band.”
“School was my oasis. I was comfortable, and I enjoyed learning,” he says.
He had to know how to take a little teasing from the other kids.
“I had the dubious honor of ‘most freckles’ in my senior high school class," he says. “My very funny friends use to call me ‘Little Bobby Frenck’ because I was bigger than most of them.”
He met his New Orleans-born wife, Keila Dawson, at Yokosuka Naval Station in Japan. Dawson, now a children’s book author, was the principal of the elementary school on base. Frenck, a pediatrician, was the school physician.
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Years later, they and their two children spent eight years in Egypt.
"The people were wonderful and so generous in trying to help me learn Arabic," Frenck says.
Fast forward to a muggy Friday afternoon in June at Laurel Park in Cincinnati's West End.
Frenck sits on a chair to get eye-to-eye with a small woman with a question. She is worried. She doesn’t know whether to take her teenage son for a COVID-19 vaccination. He'd contracted the virus, she says, and he might have antibodies.
Yes, Frenck answers, the boy should get the vaccine.
A smile breaks through the concern on Shereen Elshaer’s face.
“He told me in Arabic!” Elshaer explains, laughing.
Always the scientist, Frenck had quietly observed the woman, made a hypothesis (“She looked Egyptian, maybe Jordanian,” he says later), then tested it – by speaking the language. And he connected.
He continues to connect around Laurel Park that morning, dropping to his knee to comfort a middle-aged woman in a folding chair who is nervous about getting vaccinated. Pulling down his mask at a safe distance from a man who challenges the objectives of those who push for vaccination.
It becomes clear the man has no intention of getting vaccinated. Which does not deter Frenck from continuing to chat with him, giving facts, busting myths – and listening.
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Frenck’s confident delivery is as solid as is the fluidity of his audience of the moment. From a homeless man to a couple of college students, he remains engaged. He is relentless about accuracy. He is direct.
“I’m a Google,” he offers, simply.
It's an understatement, say those who know him.
“He has a unique gift of connecting with people and explaining even the most complicated matters in simple terms that people can understand and relate to,” says Monica Mitchell, Cincinnati Children's senior director of community relations.
She was with Frenck and the Mobile Care Unit of Cincinnati Children’s, which carried the Pfizer vaccine, at the clinic in the park.
The appearance was just one of Frenck’s many.
Through the pandemic – and regardless of intense workweeks – he has led talks at schools, churches and on Zoom about the value of the vaccine trials and, later, the need to get vaccinated.
"Oh, my God," said Jacqueline Humphries, a West End Community Research Advisory Board member. She'd joined one of the Zoom calls that hosted Frenck. "They got people together to find out the reasons people are hesitant. If you had a question, you could just call him and ask."
It was Frenck who lobbied for Cincinnati Children's COVID-19 vaccine clinics in the city's vaccine-hesitant neighborhoods. He wants everyone to get vaccinated. And he will do his part to encourage them, whatever it takes, say his colleagues.
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A pediatrician always
In medical school, Frenck chose pediatrics because it's not just about fixing people.
"With the kids, if you can have an effect early, you can actually have an effect on their whole life. So you’re preventing something, rather than trying to treat something."
Infectious disease was another specialty he chose.
In his Cincinnati Children's biography, Frenck includes: "Vaccines are the most impressive public health measure to reduce the rates of disease. I was inspired to pursue this area of pediatric patient care because infections are still the leading cause of death among children worldwide. I believe that finding methods to reduce infections among children will greatly enhance children's lives and help them grow up into healthy, happy adults."
He is at a professional point where he could focus only on research. "But I enjoy doing work with the kids," he says. "You can play with them, you can be goofy with them."
And so, Frenck continues to treat kids at the Cincinnati Children's infectious disease clinic.
When he enters a patient room, he sits – so as not to impose his 6-foot-4-inch frame on the child. He'll ask about her toy, or what videogames he likes best.
"What I never do is lie to them," Frenck says. "They ask, 'Is this going to hurt?' 'Yes. This is gonna hurt,' " he tells them. " 'But if you need to cry, that’s OK.' "
"As soon as you lie, you’re done," he explains. "You’ve lost their trust."
That trust is everything, he says.
From the start of COVID-19 clinical trials, Frenck advocated to include children as soon as possible. Again and again, he told other researchers and anyone he could reach (he’s been on national and local TV news shows, in digital and print news publications) that the children must be protected.
He's had the pleasure, he says, of interacting with children through the pandemic as the research center's work has included COVID-19 vaccine trials for them.
He says he always asked the teenagers why they wanted to take part in a trial.
"It was universally the same answer: ‘If it’s not me, then who else? It’s important for my friends to see that I did it and it’s OK.’ "
"They wanted to advance things. The kids really were doing it for others," Frenck says.
The youngest children, he says, may have not quite understood.
But on one spring day this year, Frenck walked into a room to see a small clinical trial patient waiting with her parents.
The girl, 4, was dressed in a green romper decorated with a spray of white polka dots. A white bow adorned her blonde hair.
"I came in the room and introduced myself," Frenck said. "I told her she looked very pretty, and she said, 'Thank you.' "
What she said next triggered delight in the tall pediatrician and vaccine expert.
"I am going to get my COVID vaccine today!” the girl told Frenck.
“I said, 'You are?' " he recalls. "And she said – with a big smile and very proud – 'Yes I am!' "
It was, for the little girl, and in a way, for Bob Frenck, a very important day.
Follow Terry DeMio on Twitter: @tdemio.