U.S. will prepare coronavirus strain for potential human challenge trials
Source: Washington Post
U.S. researchers will create a strain of the coronavirus that could be used in possible vaccine trials called human challenge experiments, Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview Friday.
The United States isn’t committed to embarking on such ethically fraught trials but has begun the process to create a stock of coronavirus strain that could be used to infect people, in case such trials become necessary, Fauci said. He called it a “Plan C or Plan D,” a preliminary step being taken because creating a strain that meets exacting regulatory standards will take months. Large, 30,000-person trials that are testing the effectiveness of experimental vaccines are likely to yield results sooner and provide much-needed safety data.
“You generally do [human challenge trials] if you don’t have enough infections in the community at any given time to get a signal from the vaccine,” Fauci said. “Unfortunately for us, we don’t have that problem — we have a lot of infections.”
Typically, researchers test vaccines by inoculating people with the experimental drug or a placebo and waiting to see if those who got the real vaccine develop fewer cases or less-severe illness after being exposed to a virus in daily life. To tell if a coronavirus vaccine is 60 percent effective, Fauci has estimated that 150 to 160 people within the 30,000 participating in each trial need to become sick, for example.
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/us-will-prepare-coronavirus-strain-for-potential-human-challenge-trials/ar-BB17YrCq?li=BBnb7Kz
= new reply since forum marked as read
