Member-only story
Would You Volunteer to Be Exposed to the Coronavirus for the Sake of Science?
The idea behind human challenge trials
A human challenge trial is a study where people are deliberately exposed to an infection in order to test things like vaccines and drugs. Such trials are being suggested by a variety of experts, though not everyone agrees on the value for the coronavirus pandemic — or the ethics.
Recently, an effort called 1 Day Sooner launched. The group is asking people to sign up if they wish to participate in a human challenge trial for Covid-19 or want to partake in advocacy efforts. So far, according to the site, more than 1,750 people in 44 countries have said they would be interested in volunteering if there was a human challenge trial for the novel coronavirus.
Human challenge trials have been used in past outbreaks of diseases like malaria, typhoid, cholera, and more. The reason they are used is to speed up the time it takes to develop a vaccine. Some scientists are pushing the idea forward for a Covid-19 vaccine. In a March article published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, bioethicist Nir Eyal and epidemiologists Marc Lipsitch and Peter G. Smith write that “such studies, by accelerating vaccine evaluation, could reduce the global burden of coronavirus-related mortality and morbidity.”
Normally, testing a coronavirus vaccine means recruiting a group of healthy people, giving the vaccine to one half and a placebo to the other half. Then researchers would wait and see what happens when people get infected. (It is assumed that some people would be infected at some point during their daily lives.) Because of strict social distancing rules, however, the assumption that people will eventually become infected with Covid-19 isn’t as sound right now. It’s argued that a human challenge trial would make the testing process go much faster, since scientists would not need to wait for people to become naturally infected in order to get results.
Ethically, such a trial is tricky. Especially for a disease like Covid-19, which can have serious and potentially deadly symptoms for people of all ages. As writer Dylan Matthews argues in Vox, in other similar studies, the diseases — like malaria — have a very low death rate for young, healthy people.
