Thousands Of People Want To Be Exposed To Covid-19 To Help Speed Up Vaccine Development
According to CNN, thousands of people want to deliberately infect themselves with coronavirus to help speed up vaccine development. As shocking as this may sound, the idea of infecting people in the quest for a vaccine is not new to medical research. However, it is tightly regulated. It has previously been used to tackle diseases such as malaria, cholera, and flu, for which effective treatments exist. The World Health Organization even conditionally backs the Covid-19 vaccine trials that infect people and has released new guidance on how the approach could be ethically justified despite the potential dangers for participants.
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20-year-old Abie Rohrig is one of more than 16,000 people who have signaled their support for the controversial method. As the news site notes, the signees of the online registry which is a new website called 1 Day Sooner — have all checked a box next to the statement: “I am interested in being exposed to the coronavirus to speed up vaccine development.”
The practice is called a human-challenge study or controlled human infection study — and can cut down a vaccine study by several months. As freighting as this process may sound, Rohrig, who donated his kidney to save a stranger’s life when he was just 18-years-old said he’s certainly up for it: “I know that there are risks, and if I were to do this, and it were to go poorly, then that would be terrible, my family would be really sad,” Rohrig said. But “someone has to step up. It seems like this just needs to happen,” CNN quotes.
This method is apparently much simpler rather than waiting for months to assess what percentage of thousands of vaccine-trial volunteers get infected with the disease, CNN notes. During this process, about 100 volunteers are exposed directly to the pathogen — “via syringe, cocktail, mosquito bite or nasal spray after an experimental vaccine or placebo is administered. (If the Covid-19 study comes to fruition, experts say it would likely be administered by nose drop.)”
While the reward may be high, the risk is as well.
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