Scientists deliberately gave people COVID -- here's what they learnt

[Edim]

"Only half of participants who were exposed to the coronavirus developed infections, with mostly mild symptoms."
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00319-9

[Throck]

1. I wonder if research was done like this in the US?

A bit scary.

[hlthe2b]

4. No. Not for COVID-19. In the past challenge experiments have been done for bacterial infections

like Salmonella, but it would be very tough to get them past an IRB review board today and a highly mutable virus like COVID-19--even less so, fortunately.

[lapfog_1]

2. And this study is completely worthless now

"The UK trial, led by researchers at Imperial College London and a Dublin-based commercial clinical-research organization called Open Orphan and its subsidiary hVIVO, was announced in October 2020, and the first participants were exposed in early 2021. Volunteers received £4,565 for their participation, which involved at least two weeks of quarantine at a high-level isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

The first participants received a very low dose"

Before the age of Omicron... either B.1 or B.2... and low viral loads were used, which is very important to the severity of the illness in unvaccinated people.

B.2 Omicron is many times more infectious than what they were given and it really matters about vaccination status and your co-morbidities and viral load of the initial exposure as to the severity of the resulting illness.

And all of the participants were volunteers... that should be in the headline.

[hlthe2b]

3. Very early variant (not delta) so I would draw zero conclusions re: safety of these challenge trials

Given how little we fully understand long-hauler syndrome, that would be one IRB approval (human subjects review board) that I would not hang my hat on receiving in this country, at least for the near future. Nor is it likely the results and conclusions are transferrable to other past and future COVID-19 variants.

[Scrivener7]

5. Crap article, and looks like a crap study.

1) What strain of Covid? Is any of this research good for current or future strains? Or were people put in danger for no reason?

2)

The results were posted1 on 2 February to the Research Square preprint server and have not been peer-reviewed.

3)

The UK trial, led by researchers at Imperial College London and a Dublin-based commercial clinical-research organization called Open Orphan

Research for profit is never a good idea.

4)

Meagan Deming, a vaccine scientist and virologist at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, says the study confirms insights gained from other COVID-19 studies, such as the swift rise in viral levels.

So putting people through this risk gained no new information.

[Edim]

8. There is a link to the original paper in the article.

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1121993/v1

[Scrivener7]

10. And so? The same conditions still apply.

[lapucelle]

11. The paper hasn't undergone peer review.

I read profiles.

[left-of-center2012]

6. Right off the bat ...

I have to question any article that uses the word "learnt"

[Edim]

7. Learnt and learned are both used as...

...the past participle and past tense of the verb to learn. Learned is the generally accepted way of spelling it in the United States and Canada, while the rest of the English-speaking world seems to prefer learnt for now.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/learned-learnt/#:~:text=Learnt%20and%20learned%20are%20both,world%20seems%20to%20prefer%20learnt.

[Crunchy Frog]

12. It's the correct spelling in the UK.

[Klaralven]

9. Safety, tolerability and viral kinetics during SARS-CoV-2 human challenge

Abstract
To establish a novel SARS-CoV-2 human challenge model, 36 volunteers aged 18-29 years without evidence of previous infection or vaccination were inoculated with 10 TCID50 of a wild-type virus (SARS-CoV-2/human/GBR/484861/2020) intranasally. Two participants were excluded from per protocol analysis due to seroconversion between screening and inoculation. Eighteen (~53%) became infected, with viral load (VL) rising steeply and peaking at ~5 days post-inoculation. Virus was first detected in the throat but rose to significantly higher levels in the nose, peaking at ~8.87 log10 copies/ml (median, 95% CI [8.41,9.53). Viable virus was recoverable from the nose up to ~10 days post-inoculation, on average. There were no serious adverse events. Mild-to-moderate symptoms were reported by 16 (89%) infected individuals, beginning 2-4 days post-inoculation. Anosmia/dysosmia developed more gradually in 12 (67%) participants. No quantitative correlation was noted between VL and symptoms, with high VLs even in asymptomatic infection, followed by the development of serum spike-specific and neutralising antibodies. However, lateral flow results were strongly associated with viable virus and modelling showed that twice-weekly rapid tests could diagnose infection before 70-80% of viable virus had been generated. Thus, in this first SARS-CoV-2 human challenge study, no serious safety signals were detected and the detailed characteristics of early infection and their public health implications were shown.

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1121993/v1

Full text at the link above.

I'd be astonished if certain biowarfare labs had not conducted human challenge studies very early on to assess the national security risk associated with the pandemic.