Article Text
Abstract
To counter the pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), some have proposed accelerating SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development through controlled human infection (or ‘challenge’) trials. These trials would involve the deliberate exposure of relatively few young, healthy volunteers to SARS-CoV-2. We defend this proposal against the charge that there is still too much uncertainty surrounding the risks of COVID-19 to responsibly run such a trial.
- clinical trials
- ethics
- philosophical ethics
- research ethics
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Footnotes
Correction notice This paper has been updated since first published to correct references 23, 25, and 26.
Contributors RS and NE developed the idea for this manuscript in discussion and RS wrote a first draft. RS, LB and NE all contributed to subsequent revisions over multiple drafts. RS, LB and NE all approved the final version of the manuscript and are all guarantors.
Funding NE’s and RS’s work was funded by NIAID (AI114617-01A1), as well as by Open Philanthropy.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement There are no data in this work.
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