Humans are deliberately being infected with the coronavirus in the U.K. — the first country in the world to give ethical approval for trials that infect people with the virus, which researchers say allows them to learn more about COVID-19 in its early stages.
The ethics of such challenge studies were discussed at length in a recent “Coronavirus in Context” video featuring Dr. John Whyte, chief medical officer at WebMD and Dr. Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College in London.
Openshaw pointed out that the 100 study volunteers, ages 18 to 30, were selected because they are at low risk of developing COVID-19. They were given the lowest dose of the original SARS-CoV-2 — not a variant — to cause nasal colonization and were treated with remdesivir before any symptoms occurred, he said.
When asked by Whyte if the challenge study was unethical, Openshaw said no.
“We don't believe it is,” Openshaw said. “We do know an awful lot about the virus that we are now using to infect, and as I said, we are going to be using the very smallest dose we can. We're not using one of the new variants, which we have less information about. We are using virus which was circulating last summer, where we really do have a lot of information about exactly how it behaves.”
SOURCE: Medscape March 15, 2021