Human Challenge Trials For Coronavirus Vaccines Need Healthy Volunteers

Around 100 scientists are calling for healthy volunteers to become subjects of trials that will test the effectiveness of potential coronavirus vaccines. The scientists, which include 15 Nobel laureates and the director of the University of Oxford’s COVID-19 vaccine program, signed on Wednesday an open letter to Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), requesting to authorize the human “challenge trials.”

The human challenge trials will involve deliberately exposing healthy volunteers to the new coronavirus after receiving a vaccine. According to the scientists, this move will accelerate the development of a COVID-19 vaccine as it will test whether coronavirus vaccine candidates will work.

While such challenge trials are embroiled in controversy, experts around the world insist on expediting the trials, saying their benefits outweigh the risks. In a letter published by the organization “1 Day Sooner,” the group pushing for the trials, the experts called on the U.S. government to authorize the conduct of the tests.

“If challenge trials can safely and effectively speed the vaccine development process then there is a formidable presumption in favor of their use, which would require a very compelling ethical justification to overcome,” wrote “1 Day Sooner.”

The scientists also explained that human challenge trials can provide data much faster than conventional efficacy trials, which take months longer. “In such trials, volunteers still receive the vaccine candidate or a control,” they explained. “Instead of resuming life as usual and waiting to catch a virus, volunteers are deliberately exposed to the pathogen under controlled conditions.”

Aside from human challenge trials are faster than conventional trials, the scientists also said they are more likely to conclude with interpretable results. They said human challenge trials are necessary since the COVID-19 pandemic calls for an urgent solution.

“The COVID-19 pandemic must be fought urgently on many fronts, but it is hard to picture robust economic and social recoveries in the absence of a vaccine. We are writing to underscore the vast importance of human challenge trials as a method to help develop vaccines,” they wrote.

More than a hundred coronavirus vaccines are already under development around the world, 23 of which are in the clinical evaluation stage.