LONDON – The British government says it may take part in a study that tries to deliberately infect volunteers who have been given an experimental vaccine against the coronavirus in an effort to more quickly determine if the vaccine works.
The approach, called a challenge study, is risky but proponents think it may produce results faster than typical studies, which wait to see if volunteers who have been given an experimental treatment or a dummy version get sick. “We are working with partners to understand how we might collaborate on the potential development of a COVID-19 vaccine through human challenge studies,” the U.K.