The challenge trials began to move away from “the periphery of medical research” and towards more traditional acceptance, said Dr. Joshua Osowicki, pediatric doctor on infectious diseases at the Murdoch Children Research Institute in Melbourne , in Australia. Although the volunteers have always fallen ill, they have never been compared to death or seriously harm.
This general scientific acceptance was tested during the pandemic. In the spring of 2020, when the world rushed to a coronavirus vaccine, some scientists began to call for a broader approach which, they say, should include such trials. In June, three eminent scientists argued in the Journal of Infectious Diseases that they could help accelerate the development of a vaccine.
A fiery debate broke out among the public health community. In April 2020, 35 members of the US Congress wrote a letter calling for regulators to allow trials for challenges for COVVI-19 vaccines. Three months later, 177 eminent scientists, including 15 winners of the Nobel Prize, join their call. But the opponents argued that the risks of infecting volunteers with an ill -understood virus were too large. The National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all refused to allow them. At least one test, in the Netherlands, was scuttled due to the perceived risk.
And yet, instead of torpedoing the estate, the pandemic “revitalized it,” said Dr. Christopher Chiu, immunologist at the Imperial College in London. In 2021, after months of deliberation, the First trial of COVVI-19 challenge to the world in the world started at the Imperial College in London – one of the two which took place between 2021 and 2022 for COVID -19 – and the interest increased from there.
In 2020, when he was locked in his apartment in Brooklyn, a former business lawyer named Joshua Morrison stumbled on a first version of the article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases pleading for trials for Coints challenges. In March, Mr. Morrison and two others founded a advocacy group in Washington, DC, as a place of organization of potential volunteers for Défi de Défi COVVI-19. As a sign at the speed of challenge tests, they called it 1 day earlier. In a few months, the organization had tens of thousands of registrations.