The Controversial Human Challenge for COVID-19 Vaccines is Gaining Support as the Pandemic Continues

From the early day of the pandemic, researchers have been advocating for a quick way to determine the viability of the COVID-19 vaccine.

The Controversy

The intentional attempt to infect the volunteers with the virus of the SARS-CoV-2 is what they are trying to do. Many of the scientists and ethicists have been disapproving of this method of testing, but the large corps of volunteers willing to take part in the “human challenge” trial, and the accurate virus strained necessity have driven the support for such methods of testing the vaccine.

The Study Group

1Day Sooner, is an advocacy group that has collected over 30,000 people willing to take part in the direct human testing of the vaccine, when there is no treatment available in case something goes wrong. The group had sent an open letter, signed by 15 Nobel laureates and 100 researchers, ethicists, philosophers to the U.S. NAtional Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, urging the U.S. government “to undertake the immediate preparations for the human challenge trials.” The group selected young, healthy people who are less likely to die from the disease, and Adrian Hill of University of Oxford had been a signatory that has developed the world’s leading COVID-19 vaccines so far.

The Debate

Researchers have used human challenges to test the vaccines for other symptoms, but in those experiments, there had been known treatments in case the vaccine hurt the volunteers. The World Health Organization was conflicted in which they should be allowed to carry on with the human challenge trials when there is no known rescue treatment for COVID-19. Not only this, WHO was divided in half debating whether the use of participants at risk of the natural infection for these trials, which has already begun, would become an efficient way to speed the vaccine efforts.

The Leaders of the Movement

The founders of 1Day Sooner, Sophie Rose and Josh Morrison are University of Oxford cancer researchers, and Harvard Law School graduates. Morrison thought of taking initiative in this crisis by starting the advocacy group when coming upon an unpublished literature review about COVID-19 human challenge, co-authored by Rose. 1Day Sooner is playing a big role in showing that there are good people willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Rose had published the Clinical Infectious Diseases, which was co-authored by her and Morrison with a group of researchers on how a human challenge could potentially speed up the search for a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine.

Trial Obstacles

This challenge trial will require large amounts of strain of SARS-CoV-2, grown in biosafety level 3 laboratory under the good manufacturing processes. Based on the strength of infection the strains could cause, the doses could be calibrated as well. Making the challenge virus, however, would take at least until September 2020, and at that point, according to the proposals by WHO, the trial should be recruiting people of three different doses, to find that one causes the mild respiratory illness is in 70% of the subjects.

Potential Rewards

Human challenge trials could still answer key questions about how well the vaccine could actually work and if the conventional trials have not been able to identify a good candidate by then, the challenge trials could aid in more than 150 COVID-18 vaccines to be developed. Given the risks, Rose says,

“There is a world in which we have a vaccine by then and that would be great, but there’s also a world in which we don’t. I know I would much rather live in a world where we were ready to implement a human challenge study.”

Resources Used:

Cohen, Jon. “Controversial 'Human Challenge' Trials for COVID-19 Vaccines Gain Support.” Controversial ‘Human Challenge’ Trials for COVID-19 Vaccines Gain Support, 20 July 2020, www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/controversial-human-challenge-trials-covid-19-vaccines-gain-support.