February 18th According to a report by Deutero News Agency London on February 17, the British Department of Commerce, Energy and Industrial Strategy announced on Wednesday that in order to better understand the coronavirus, a British study will deliberately infect participants with the pathogen.
The Ministry of Commerce, Energy and Industrial Strategy said that the study will be the world’s first “human challenge” study on the novel coronavirus.
Up to 90 volunteers between the ages of 18 and 30 “will be exposed to COVID-19 in a safe and controlled environment to deepen understanding of how the virus affects human beings,” the department said in a statement.
The report pointed out that “human challenge” experiments to expose healthy people to pathogens have also been carried out in the past, such as for the development of influenza vaccine or malaria vaccine.
After obtaining approval from the UK Clinical Trial Ethics Agency, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy specifically encourages young and healthy people to sign up for the project, which will begin in the coming weeks.
“The safety of volunteers is paramount, which means that this virus feature study will initially use the virus circulating in the UK since March 2020, which has been shown to be less risk among young healthy adults.” The statement said.
Doctors and researchers will monitor participants 24 hours a day, and participants will also be compensated.
The purpose of this study is to find out how the immune system responds to the virus and identify the factors that affect the transmission of the virus in infected people.
The statement said that these results will play a key role in the development of the vaccine, and said that in follow-up studies, participants will be inoculated with a new substance and then exposed to the virus.
The advantage of this method is that it can obtain more reliable results to test the effectiveness of vaccines.
The usual practice is to vaccinate tens of thousands of people and compare the infection rate with the unvaccinated control group.
However, the study of “human challenge” has caused controversy.
For example, the German Association of R&D Pharmaceutical Companies rejected such experiments last year on immoral grounds.
“This challenging study may present distorted results, because research results obtained only on young and healthy people may not be applicable to older people and chronically ill patients.
And these people are the ones most vulnerable to COVID-19.” The association said on its website.
The association said that human-induced infections are not equivalent to actual infections in daily life.
