Posted on 10/20/2020 8:23:06 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Researchers in Britain are preparing to start a controversial COVID-19 "human challenge" study in which dozens of healthy volunteers will be exposed to live coronavirus in an effort to speed up vaccine development.
The Human Challenge Programme will be conducted by Imperial College London, which said Tuesday in a statement that it would be working in cooperation with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, and hVIVO, a clinical company that has worked on viral human challenge models.
The U.K. government is preparing to invest $43.4 million (33.6 million pounds) in the study, which is the first of its kind involving the coronavirus.
The plan is to recruit healthy people between the ages of 18 and 30 with no prior history of COVID-19 symptoms and no known risk factors for the disease. Researchers would inoculate them with a candidate vaccine, then test its effectiveness by deliberately exposing them to live coronavirus.
The study is still awaiting final regulatory approval. If it is given the green light, it will begin in January at a biosecure unit at London's Royal Free Hospital. Volunteers will be quarantined in the facility and receive a laboratory-grown SARS-CoV-2 strain as part of the trial. They will be monitored around the clock for a few weeks.
Such studies are controversial because they raise ethical concerns. However, proponents say they can speed up vaccine development and, ultimately, save lives.
"No study is completely risk free, but the Human Challenge Program partners will be working hard to ensure we make the risks as low as we possibly can," lead researcher Dr. Chris Chiu from Imperial College London said in the statement.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
Has to be done if there is going to be a vaccine.
Makes sense if they want to know efficacy.
Using healthier samples who would normally get over it w/o problems makes it a pretty safe bet...as long as the vaccine doesn’t hold any surprises.
The joys of socialism!
Only if they are using sufficiently informed volunteers, but if so, then thats alright.
“Only if they are using sufficiently informed volunteers, but if so, then thats alright.”
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Could have, and should have, been done in August. Once the election is past, things on the vaccine and therapy fronts will move rapidly... the foot dragging will be ended.
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