Volunteers would earn cash for the risks they take on our behalf.
It’s time to recruit some healthy young people, inject them with various experimental coronavirus vaccines, and then expose them to the virus to see if any of them work. The health of the volunteers would be monitored carefully, and they would be given access to the best available care should they need it. Besides the satisfaction of perhaps playing a role in saving hundreds of thousands of lives and hastening the end of the lockdowns, the volunteers could earn some cash for their troubles as well.
An article today in Science by the Northwestern University bioethicist Seema Shah and her colleagues lays out an ethical framework for initiating such controlled human infection studies (CHIs) to speed up the process of identifying effective vaccines and treatments for the virus that causes COVID-19.
