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More than 14,000 people in the United States volunteer for a so-called “human challenge trial,” an ethically controversial way to test vaccines that deliberately infect people with the coronavirus.
“It’s not every day that we give a healthy individual exposure to a pathogen; it’s exactly the same thing that doctors try to protect people.” But it is becoming increasingly clear that the only sustainable way out of the current social and health crisis is a vaccine, and there are ways to conduct such a trial that are perfectly ethical, “said Dr. Nir Eyal, director of the Population Level Bioethics Center at Rutgers University of New Jersey.
As the world rushes to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, scientists warn that a vaccine is likely to be missing at best from one year to 18 months at best, because they take time to develop and test, often until one of each.
Epidemiologists, philosophers, and vaccinologists have recently been advocating human challenge studies to speed up the process. The authors of the latest research predict that with informed consent, the human trial could bring a vaccine months in advance and save thousands of lives.
However, although the human trial would be consensual, observers fear that it presents new risks and unknowns, as there is little consensus on the treatment, death rate, or long-term effects of the virus.
