Corona vaccine human trial deemed unsafe

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

To accelerate the development of a coronavirus vaccine, the 1Day Sooner campaign has proposed conducting human trials. However, many scientists consider this practice to be unsafe and doubt that it will solve the problems at a faster pace.

At the moment, the desire to accelerate the development of a vaccine against coronavirus infection is gaining momentum by deliberately infecting young and healthy volunteers with this virus. The campaign has already attracted nearly 1,500 potential volunteers to take part in ethically flawed trials in which healthy people will be deliberately infected with the coronavirus.

Dubbed 1Day Sooner, this campaign has no affiliation with groups or companies that fund or develop vaccines. However, co-founder Josh Morrison hopes to demonstrate that a multitude of people support such human trials because they may lead to an effective coronavirus vaccine faster than standard trials.

Routine vaccine trials take a very long time because thousands of people first receive either a vaccine or a placebo, and then scientists keep track of which of the volunteers gets infected in the course of their daily lives. A provocative trial could, in theory, yield results much faster: a much smaller group of volunteers are given an experimental vaccine and then deliberately challenged with the virus to determine how effective the vaccine is.

“We want to get as many people as possible who are willing to do this, and we want to list in advance those who could take part in provocative trials if they do decide to do so,” said Morrison, who is also the executive director of Human Rights Watch. organ donation organization Waitlist Zero. “At the same time, we believe that government decisions regarding provocative trials will be more informed if they take into account the views of those who are interested in participating in such trials.”

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According to Morrison, people who have already agreed to participate in such provocative trials are usually young people living in cities who sincerely want to make a constructive contribution to the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. “Many admit they are aware of the risks, but believe that the benefits of accelerating the vaccine development process are worth taking those risks,” Morrison explained.

Trials have been carried out in the past in the search for cures for influenza and malaria. A team of scientists led by bioethics specialist Nir Eyal at Rutgers University in New Brownswick noted that provocative trials involving humans can indeed be conducted safely and with all ethical principles, they wrote about this in an article published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases in March.

This point of view finds some support in political circles as well. This week 35 members of the United States Congress, led by Democrats Bill Foster and Donna Shalala, called on Health Welfare Chief Alex Azar to consider conducting provocative trials with human participation to speed up the creation process. vaccines against coronavirus.

Charlie Weller, head of the vaccine program at London-based biomedical research firm Wellcome, said they had already begun discussions within their company on the ethical and logistical side of conducting provocative trials to create a vaccine against the coronavirus. However, she said, it is not yet clear whether such trials will speed up the process of creating a vaccine.

Scientists will first need to determine how they can safely expose people to the virus, and decide how such testing can be done ethically and if it can be done at all. “I think there is such a possibility,” Weller said. "But we need to work through a lot of questions to see if such tests will help speed up the process."