INFECTING PEOPLE ON PURPOSE 🤬

Clinical trials start with small numbers of people and at first only look for side effects and immune responses, slowly building up to a large study that tests efficacy—a process that will take at least 1 year for the new virus.

But as the scale of the pandemic becomes clearer, a provocative, ethically complicated proposal to shave many months off that timeline is gaining traction: Give people an experimental vaccine and then deliberately try to infect them.

Clinical trials start with small numbers of people and at first only look for side effects and immune responses, slowly building up to a large study that tests efficacy—a process that will take at least 1 year for the new virus. But as the scale of the pandemic becomes clearer, a provocative, ethically complicated proposal to shave many months off that timeline is gaining traction: Give people an experimental vaccine and then deliberately try to infect them.

Stanley Plotkin of the University of Pennsylvania, inventor of the current rubella vaccine and a leader in the vaccine field, says a carefully designed “human challenge” trial could offer clear proof of a vaccine’s worth at blinding speed. “We’re talking 2, 3 months,” says Plotkin, who has co-authored a commentary, now being submitted for publication, that describes how this might be ethically done. “People who are faced with a terrifying problem like this one will opt for measures that are unusual. And we have to constantly rethink our biases.”

A similar proposal for coronavirus challenge studies was published online today in the Journal of Infectious Diseases... https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/speed-coronavirus-vaccine-testing-deliberately-infecting-volunteers-not-so-fast-some?utm_campaign=SciMag&utm_source=JHubbard&utm_medium=Facebook#