Scientists deliberately infected healthy people with Coronavirus in Controversial 'challenge' study: Here’s what happened

UK researchers have conducted a first-of-its-kind study involving healthy young volunteers who were deliberately infected with an early strain of COVID-19. As expected, none of the participants became severely ill. This groundbreaking research allowed scientists to closely monitor symptoms and gain valuable insights into the progression of SARS-CoV-2 infections, including fluctuations in symptom severity and viral levels.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed our lives. It has affected our daily routines, caused isolation, and pushed us to focus on the importance of taking care of our health. With this pandemic came a lot of uncertainty, and scientists have been working hard to make sense of the virus to help control its spread.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been challenging for the scientific community, as they continue to grapple with questions surrounding the transmission and severity of the virus. In a bid to better understand the virus, researchers have conducted a controversial "challenge study," in which they deliberately infected volunteers with the virus that causes COVID-19. This controversial "challenge study" shed light on questions central to public health, including whether the severity of symptoms correlates with how contagious people are. It shows that there is a select group of people, known as "supershedders," that spew vastly more virus into the air than others despite having mild symptoms of COVID-19.

The study's results highlight how widely and unpredictably disease severity and contagiousness vary between people, making it challenging to control the virus. This variability among humans has made this virus so difficult to control. The study did not come without some concerns. Is ethically unethical to give individuals an infection that can cause severe illness? Some researchers question the relevance of the study's results to today's world, but infectious-disease researcher Anika Singanayagam at Imperial College London, a co-author of the paper, believes that the data is in line with what she and her colleagues have observed with naturally acquired infections. ?The study also suggests that human physiology, not the virus, is to blame for some of the inconsistency of COVID-19. The researchers' measurements of viral shedding indicate that some people produce vastly more virus than others when infected with the same amount of the virus.

Challenge studies are "very bold," says infectious-disease doctor Monica Gandhi at the University of California, San Francisco, but the research design comes with benefits. Challenge studies can substantially speed up vaccine testing and are the only way to understand certain aspects of COVID-19, such as the stage before people test positive or develop symptoms.

The study's researchers inoculated 34 healthy young participants with a known quantity of viral particles and measured the viral levels in the participants' noses and throats, in the air, on their hands, and on various surfaces in the rooms. Of the 18 participants who developed infections, two shed 86% of the airborne virus detected over the study's entire course – despite having only mild symptoms.

Additionally, the study shows that rapid tests (lateral flow tests) can be a powerful tool for controlling viral spread, provided that people test as soon as they detect symptoms. None of the participants emitted detectable levels of the virus into the air before testing positive. Only a small proportion of them left a detectable viral load on their hands, on surfaces, or on masks that they wore temporarily. However, some researchers caution that the route of infection differs from that of most natural infections, raising questions about the true applicability of the study's results.

Despite limitations to the study's results to today's world, the information gathered is still useful. The team plans to perform similar challenge studies with more-recent variants of the virus.

What are your thoughts on deliberately infecting volunteers with the virus that causes COVID-19 for the purpose of scientific research? Is it ethical to perform challenge studies? Do you believe the potential benefits of challenge studies outweigh the risks to human subjects?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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