How might a vaccine be accelerated13 Aug 2020 18:53
The Washington Post says: as one option !
Adopt “challenge” trials. In the final stage of testing, researchers typically give a vaccine to one group of volunteers and a placebo to another, then wait to see whether significantly fewer in the first group develop the targeted infection. That takes time. A quicker but riskier alternative is to inject volunteers with the vaccine, then deliberately expose them to the pathogen. Such challenge trials are the basis for animal studies of vaccines, and they’ve been used in human tests of cholera, malaria and typhoid shots as well. Some prominent scientists have argued that the urgency of a Covid-19 vaccine justifies their use now, and the website 1daysooner.org has collected the names of tens of thousands of people who say they’d participate. Skeptics say it’s unethical to use this trial design until there are proven therapies to treat those who would become sick.