The NIH Should Run Human Challenge Trials for COVID

As I have been warning, social distancing measures are making it more difficult to test COVID vaccines even as the cost of COVID remains very high.

WashPost: The Oxford group earlier boasted that it had an 80 percent chance of developing an effective vaccine by September. Hill said the difficulty of testing the vaccine in Britain may mean there’s only a 50 percent chance of success within that time frame now.

The probability of an Oxford vaccine by September has fallen by 30 percentage points. Oxford isn’t the only vaccine and we may be able to find clinical trial candidates in Brazil and the United States where infections continue to occur. So let’s be generous and convert this into say a 10% increase in a one month’s delay of any vaccine. The world economy is losing $375 billion a month so this means we have lost an expected $37.5 billion. That number highlights why we should be willing to pay large sums to speed vaccines and it also indicates the immense value of human challenge trials.

More than 28,000 people have already volunteered to be part of a challenge trial and if we paid a few hundred volunteers a million dollars each it would be worthwhile (and would surely increase the number of volunteers).

The main impediment to human challenge trials appears to be skittish firms rather than bureaucratic governments which is why challenge trials should test multiple vaccines under the auspices of the NIH. The NIH umbrella can protect the firms and increase the efficiency of the trials.

Addendum: China is adopting a bold approach. We used to be bold. Apathy is killing us.

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