After nearly a year of debate, the Covid-19 vaccine challenge trials are officially coming
After nearly a year of public advocacy and often rancorous ethical debate, human challenge trials for Covid-19 vaccines are getting off the ground in London.
The UK government’s Covid-19 Vaccine Taskforce and the contract research firm Open Orphan announced today a £10 million ($13 million) plan to test experimental Covid-19 vaccines in volunteers who are intentionally exposed to the novel coronavirus. The studies, which won’t launch until early 2021, come after 9 months of debate over whether such studies were safe and would actually hasten vaccine development, and they follow a long history of researchers using challenge models to study other respiratory viruses, including flu and the coronaviruses that cause the common cold.
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