UK approves study that will deliberately infect volunteers with coronavirus

British regulators on Wednesday approved a plan to deliberately infect unvaccinated volunteers with the coronavirus. The volunteers will be administered tiny droplets of the virus into their nostrils, with the objective of determining the lowest dose of virus needed to infect them. In doing so, researchers hope to learn more about how the immune system responds to the coronavirus and develop ways of directly comparing the effectiveness of treatments and vaccines. “We are going to learn an awful lot about the immunology of the virus,” said Peter Openshaw, an Imperial College London professor involved in the study. He said the study would be able “to accelerate not only understanding of diseases caused by infection, but also to accelerate the discovery of new treatments and of vaccines.” The concept of a human challenge trial has been the subject of much debate since the pandemic began. Although the idea is not new, there is no known cure for COVID-19, which raises ethical concerns. The British study will be limited to healthy volunteers aged 18-30 years. Following their exposure to the virus, participants will be isolated for 2 weeks in the hospital. They will be paid about $6,200 for that and a year’s worth of followup appointments—a sum researchers said would compensate participants for their time away from work and families without creating too much of an economic incentive for people to participate.