by Susan Tansey, member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and an independent Consultant Pharmaceutical Physician
Back in March, discussion started as to whether it would be appropriate to consider challenge trials to speed up vaccine development during the COVID-19 pandemic. Challenge trials are a specific kind of vaccine trial where otherwise healthy volunteers are given an experimental vaccine prior to being intentionally exposed to the virus the vaccine is targeting (or a milder version of it) to see if they are protected. (To read more about challenge trials, see Katharine Wright’s earlier blog How ethically challenging are challenge trials?). These types of clinical trials have been used to test vaccines for other serious infections such as typhoid, malaria, and cholera, and are carried out in very specialised centres that are able to minimise risks to the volunteers and staff conducting them.
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