Why Deliberately Infect People With the Coronavirus?

The U.K. plans to deliberately infect dozens of healthy young adult volunteers in the coming weeks with SARS-CoV-2 to learn more about how the virus affects people and the effectiveness of experimental vaccines. The research, the first so-called human challenge study for Covid-19 announced anywhere, has been approved by the country’s clinical trials ethics body and aims to start by mid-March. Yet it throws up a number of questions, including the availability of reliable “rescue treatments” in the event that participants develop a serious illness.

It’s a controlled human infection study in which healthy volunteers are deliberately “challenged” with an infectious disease organism. The World Health Organization says such research can be particularly valuable for testing vaccines because fewer participants need to be given experimental inoculations to gauge their efficacy and safety, potentially speeding the development of immunizations. Vaccines could also be compared side by side, limiting the need for placebo controls. Human challenge studies may also be used to glean information about a pathogen, such as its ability to cause disease, factors that put people at risk of illness and clues about the way the body generates immunity in response to an infection. Organizers of the U.K. study say this type of research has been used over many decades and for diseases including malaria, typhoid, cholera, norovirus and flu.