UK Plans ‘Challenge Trials,’ Which Will Intentionally Give People COVID-19 to Test Vaccines
for the first human challenge study of COVID-19, which involves deliberately infecting volunteers with the virus that causes the disease, in order to test the effectiveness of vaccines.
on how to ethically conduct human challenge studies, notes that during a pandemic, the risk of delays in developing treatments should be considered alongside the risks to volunteers who are intentionally exposed to disease. “There is a moral weight to inaction as well as action,” he says. “There is an unseen risk if we don’t do [these studies]. We send a lot of doctors, nurses and care workers to work every day, and some will get really sick and die of COVID-19 in the next few weeks.
From a scientific perspective, infecting people with a known dose of the virus can help researchers be more precise about evaluating and comparing people’s immune responses to different vaccines. It will also provide those answers faster than waiting for people to be exposed naturally infected with the disease. “These could almost take the place of phase 3 trials or at least go alongside them,” says Richards.
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