He wants to get infected - for the vaccine research

This is the method used by the English physician Edward Jenner in the 18th century to produce the first vaccine. 

Jenner infected his gardener's eight-year-old boy with a small dose of cowpox, to infect him with smallpox six weeks later.  

The boy remained healthy and the trial was the beginning of the modern vaccine that would save millions of lives. But in recent years the method has been called into question.  

- What is controversial is that the subjects are actively infected at the same time as there is no effective treatment. Thus, you violate the ethical principle that says you should not be harmed, says Mats Johansson, researcher in medical ethics at Lund University.  

Now, researchers from Northwestern University in Chicago have presented a framework for how one could still use controlled infection studies on humans to get a vaccine faster. The studies must bring great social benefits and the subjects must be exposed to reasonable risks. 

For example, they must be young and healthy and have no underlying illnesses. They should also live in regions where the spread is already widespread, since the relative risk of still being infected is greater.  

Despite the risks, more than 15,000 people have already volunteered to participate in this type of study through the US 1 Day Sooner initiative.

Carson Poltorack, a student at Stanford University, is one of those who signed up as a volunteer and also started working for the organization.

"We will try to convey test subjects as these studies start, but primarily it is a way of showing that there is a great interest among the public," says Poltorack.

According to him, the volunteers who have so far signed up are "well-educated young people who have thought through this carefully".

The idea is that controlled infection studies should be used in the final stage. Traditionally, vaccines are then given to one group and placebo to another. They then live as usual and the researchers measure the difference in infection to see if the vaccine has an effect.

"Because we live more in isolation with social distancing, this method can take longer than usual and requires many more subjects," Nir Eyal, bioethicist at Harvard University, told Nature.  

He, together with a group of researchers in a study, suggested that 100 people instead give placebo and 100 people vaccine. Then everyone is infected with covid-19.  

Since the infection occurs clinically, you can follow the entire course of events and get reliable results faster, despite a small number of subjects.

“By speeding up the process of producing a vaccine, we can at best save the lives of many people and also benefit the economy. So in this case, I really think you can see the social benefits of a vaccine, says Mats Johansson, researcher in medical ethics at Lund University. 

—I don't belong on the no-side, rather maybe. But it depends on many different factors. An important thing is of course how great the current risk is for the participants, if it is a robust study, what happens if things go wrong and more. If everything is favorable and you deal with all these problems, then maybe it's okay. You have to judge on a case-by-case basis, that just saying no is the simplest but not necessarily right in such a situation, ”says Mats Johansson.

The study is published in Science.

More about the latest covid-19 research in the world of science "The road from the corona" on Monday, May 11 at 8 pm in SVT2 and on SVTplay.