The idea of intentionally infecting people in the quest for a vaccine is not alien to medical research – but it is tightly regulated. It has been used to tackle diseases including malaria, cholera and flu, for which effective treatments exist.
They can shorten the most time-consuming stage of testing – phase 3 trials, which establish whether a vaccine works effectively at scale. This stage often involves thousands of people. Instead, Prof Eyal suggests, phase 3 trials should purposely give COVID-19 to around 100 young, healthy volunteers. It would only be done for a test vaccine that already looks promising.If volunteers are already healthcare or other highly exposed frontline workers, that further reduces the relative risk. Prof Eyal told the journal Nature it might be “curiously safer” for such workers to be deliberately infected, as those who sicken might be caught more quickly on a trial than in real life.
“COVID-19 is an unprecedented global challenge that requires us to work in an unparalleled way,” sums up Charlie Weller, head of vaccines at the Wellcome Trust.
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