The UK has approved volunteers to actively infect with the new coronavirus to test the vaccine

actively infected with the new coronavirus? You didn't hear me wrong. A British ethics committee that oversees clinical trials said recently that a team of researchers in the country could start "deliberately" infecting volunteers with the new coronavirus in order to speed up vaccine research.
the controversial "Human Challenge" trial will be the first step to determine the minimum level of new coronavirus needed to infect healthy young volunteers, science.com reported. The researchers then plan to vaccinate more volunteers and have them receive "challenge doses" to assess protective effects and related immune responses.
"Human Challenge" trials, which have long been used in influenza and several other infectious diseases, allow for rapid comparison of different vaccines and provide an easier way to determine vaccine effectiveness than ongoing large-scale effectiveness trials. However, the inevitable risk of the "human challenge" trial is that the disease can be fatal, even for healthy young people, without proven effective drugs. Opponents also point out that even a mild new coronavirus infection can have long-term consequences, and say the "human challenge" test can be answered through traditional vaccine trials.
, many in the UK and elsewhere have announced their willingness to take part in such research. Despite the success of several new crown vaccines in recent months, the trials could provide important information, scientists say.
, the licensed UK team will select 90 healthy volunteers aged 18 to 30 to be quarantined and monitored 24 hours a day after exposing them to different amounts of the new coronavirus. Christopher Chiu, an immunologist at Imperial College London and lead researcher on the trial, said infected people would soon be using Redsyvir, a drug that has been approved in several countries to treat patients at high risk of contracting severe neo-pneumonia. "We're going to take viral load measurements twice a day, so we're likely to see if Redsyvir is effective for preventive treatment."
currently, Redsiway has only been tested on inpatients, with mixed results, but some experts believe it would have been better if it had been used in people early in the infection. However, even though Redsyvir was able to prevent the disease in these volunteers, it was unlikely that large-scale use of the drug would be possible for newly infected people because of the need for injections and the relatively high cost, and most people would develop only mild or no symptoms without treatment.
, on the other hand, the Human Challenge trial could also be used to study vaccines that have been adapted to be more effective against recent new coronavirus variants. These variants are more likely to spread, evade immune responses, or both. But the preliminary study will use a virus isolate obtained in the summer of 2020, when the new strain has yet to appear. "We are currently considering what variants to study next in order to test the redesigned vaccine," Chiu said. ”