Getting Sick for the Sake of Advancing Medical Research

Pegged to the launch of the UK's first Covid-19 human challenge trial in early 2021, Thomasy reports on what previous challenge trials — in which healthy volunteers are deliberately infected with a pathogen to study its course or test a vaccine — have actually been like for participants, from norovirus and influenza studies to malaria challenge work. The piece covers the ethics, the screening, the lived experience inside the isolation wards, and the scientific case for accelerating vaccine development by accepting controlled risk.