The petition includes 15 Nobel laureates and aims to prove that vaccines work
Scientists say the tests could provide information in a faster way.
Photo: JACK GUEZ / AFP / Getty Images
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More than 100 scientists, including 15 Nobel laureates, are requesting that healthy volunteers be exposed to the coronavirus to see if they vaccines against COVID-19 do they work.
Scientists on Wednesday signed an open letter to Dr. Francis Collins, chief of the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), asking for “challenge tests” in humans that they say could “greatly accelerate” the development of a vaccine against COVID-19.
Challenge tests intentionally expose healthy volunteers to an organism causing infectious disease, in this case the new coronavirus, to determine if the vaccine is effective.
“If challenge testing can safely and effectively speed up the process of developing a vaccine, then there is a formidable presumption in favor of its use, which would require a very compelling ethical justification to overcome it,” states the letter published by 1 Day Sooner, an organization that advocates challenge testing. The letter is also signed by more than 2,000 volunteers.
Signatory scientists said human challenge testing trials can provide information in a faster way than conventional trials that take longer.
Related: How to vaccinate your finances and protect yourself against the coronavirus contingency in 7 steps.
In a letter signed in April by 35 legislators who support the movement. Members of the House of Representatives asked regulators Consider allowing coronavirus-infected volunteers to accelerate vaccine testing.
Currently more than a hundred candidate vaccines are already in development worldwide and 23 of them are candidates for the clinical evaluation phase, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
For his part, an article published this month in New England Journal of Medicine, NIH members participating in an initiative to accelerate vaccines and treatments against COVID-19 said that challenge tests will not accelerate the development of an eventual immunization.
The WHO warns that such procedures do not apply to all diseases, especially those with a high case fatality rate. Dr Collins has said that challenge tests are “on the table for discussion, not to start designing a plan.”
The WHO guidelines mention that challenge tests in humans are ethical when they meet certain criteria. The experts pointed out that there must be protections, including that participants are relatively young and in good health and to provide them with the highest quality medical care with frequent monitoring.
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