The 360 | Is it worth risking lives to speed up a coronavirus vaccine?
The Trump administration last week announced a program to dramatically speed up the process of creating a vaccine for the coronavirus through a project called “Operation Warp Speed.” Containment efforts like social distancing and a robust testing regime can help limit virus spread, but experts agree the pandemic won’t be truly behind us until the broader population is given immunity through a vaccine.
Vaccines are typically tested by giving subjects a dose, then letting them go back to their everyday lives with the expectation that a certain number of them will come in contact with the virus. This process could take a long time for the coronavirus, especially given the steps to avoid infection that are part of our typical daily routines. Exposing subjects to the virus — what’s known as a “human challenge trial” — would eliminate that wait time.
The idea has also received significant pushback from scientists who argue it’s impossible to gauge how much risk participants are being subjected to because so much is unknown about the virus and how it behaves. There is also skepticism that the results of a challenge trial made up of young, healthy subjects could be applied to the broader population.
It may actually be safer to be part of a challenge trial“By the time vaccine candidates are tried, there may be some treatments that are proven to work. And surely, the brave volunteers we recruit should be assured ready access to those. The dramatic-sounding exposure of healthy volunteers to the virus is therefore adding less net risk than you might think.
The results may not be applicable to the broader population“You would only know that that works in healthy young adults, probably a very narrow age. … And that may or may not be extrapolatable information to the population with the mortality, which is, you know, 60s and 70s, and 80s.” — Infectious disease expert Myron Levine to STAT
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