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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