Risks of virus trial ‘smaller than climbing Mt Everest’
A year since reports of Covid-19 first emerged, Rhys Blakely meet the volunteers who are willing to be infected to help speed up research.
‘‘Some of my friends work for the NHS, and they’ve been taking risks all through the pandemic while I’ve been looked after and stayed safe.’’ Jennifer Wright, student and Imperial College Covid-19 trial participant
ALEX GREER, a chemistry student, runs the Effective Altruism Society at England’s Durham University. ‘‘It’s about using evidence and careful analysis to do the most good in the world,’’ he says.
With this in mind, he recently received an offer he felt he could not refuse: would he allow himself to be infected with Covid-19 in the name of science?
Greer, 20, is one of more than 2500 Britons who have volunteered to take part in the world’s first coronavirus ‘‘human challenge trials’’. Due to begin in London next month, they will involve participants being exposed to the virus in a secure bio-containment suite.
The aim is to accelerate research by studying, in a way not possible in other settings, how our bodies react to the bug, and how well the next generation of vaccines can fend it off.
Dominic Wilkinson, a professor of medical ethics at Oxford University, believes the dangers are acceptable, and that volunteering signals ‘‘ an enormous amount of altruism and maturity’’.
The project, led by Imperial College, will initially involve a few dozen 18- to 30-year-olds, free of risk factors such as heart disease or diabetes. For this age
group, studies put the chances of dying of Covid somewhere in the region of one in 10,000.
On top of that there is the possibility of ‘‘long Covid’’, where symptoms linger for weeks or months.
‘‘ But a lot of people have caught the disease and had no say in it,’’ Greer said. ‘‘Hopefully, by giving my informed consent, I can help prevent others being blindsided.’’
At 66, Paul van den Bosch, a GP who has worked for Medecins Sans Frontieres, will not be eligible for the first trials, but he hopes that older people, a priority group for vaccines and treatments, will eventually be allowed to take part.
‘‘From a practical point of view, the risks aren’t huge. They’re much smaller than a lot of the things that people do, like climbing Everest.’’
Over the past year, scientists have developed vaccines at a pace that many doubted was possible. By providing £34 million (NZ$64.25m) for the challenge trials, the British government is signalling a belief that the process can be accelerated further still.
United States company Moderna had created a coronavirus jab by February 24, although it took another eight months to show that it worked. This was done by recruiting 30,000 people for a field trial, and giving half the real vaccine and
half a placebo.
The scientists still had to wait for infections to strike naturally, however. It took until midNovember for 95 people in the trial to catch the virus, enough to assess with reasonable statistical certainty that the vaccine was effective.
Challenge trials offer a shortcut to that process, because scientists can observe infections from the moment the pathogen meets its host. By scrutinising every detail, the trials should help to define how the immune system mobilises to fend off the coronavirus, as well as the duration of vaccine-induced immunity, and the measurable signs that a person is protected.
Jennifer Wright, 29, a physics PhD student at the University of Glasgow, says she has been motivated to take part by the ability to gather otherwise unobtainable data. She would also like to feel that she has done her bit.
‘‘I would like to take a risk to help out. Some of my friends work for the NHS, and they’ve been taking risks all through the pandemic while I’ve been looked after and stayed safe.’’
Sean McPartlin, 22, a philosophy student at Oxford, became involved with 1Day Sooner, the non-profit group through which volunteers for the Imperial College trial signed up.
The volunteers are expected to be paid about £4000 (NZ$7550) for a two- or three-week stay at the Royal Free Hospital in London and probably a year of follow-up appointments. McPartlin says they are not very interested in financial incentives – it is more about ‘‘the rationale’’.
‘‘ The outstanding questions were practical – ‘What is the quarantine facility like? Will there be wifi’?’’