Ideas worth spreading

The case to infect volunteers with COVID-19 to accelerate vaccine testing

2,100,549 views |

Nir Eyal |

TED2020

• June 2020

Conventional vaccine testing is a slow, years-long process. As thousands of people continue to die each day from COVID-19, bioethicist Nir Eyal proposes a radical idea that could dramatically accelerate the vaccine development timeline: "human challenge trials," in which scientists would deliberately expose volunteers to the virus to more quickly determine a vaccine's efficacy. (This virtual conversation, hosted by head of TED Chris Anderson, was recorded June 15, 2020.)

Conventional vaccine testing is a slow, years-long process. As thousands of people continue to die each day from COVID-19, bioethicist Nir Eyal proposes a radical idea that could dramatically accelerate the vaccine development timeline: "human challenge trials," in which scientists would deliberately expose volunteers to the virus to more quickly determine a vaccine's efficacy. (This virtual conversation, hosted by head of TED Chris Anderson, was recorded June 15, 2020.)

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

About the speakers

Nir Eyal

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Dr. Nir Eyal is an international authority in population-level bioethics with research in health inequalities, health promotion and research ethics, especially in resource-poor settings.

Chris Anderson

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After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.

David Biello

TED science curator, author

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David Biello is TED's science curator and the author of "The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age."

Nir Eyal, et al. | The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2020 | Article

"Human Challenge Studies to Accelerate Coronavirus Vaccine Licensure"

Ewen Callaway | Nature, 2020 | Article

"Should scientists infect healthy people with the coronavirus to test vaccines?"

Word Health Organization | who.int, 2020 | Article

"Key criteria for the ethical acceptability of COVID-19 human challenge studies"

Stanley A. Plotkin, Arthur Caplan | Elsevier, 2020 | Article

"Extraordinary diseases require extraordinary solutions"

Seema K. Shah, et al. | Science, 2020 | Article

"Ethics of controlled human infection to address COVID-19"

Euzebiusz Jamrozik, Michael J Selgelid | Elsevier, 2020 | Article

"COVID-19 human challenge studies: ethical issues"

Richard Yetter Chappell, Peter Singer | The Washington Post, 2020 | Article

"Pandemic ethics: The case for experiments on human volunteers"

Hannah Devlin | The Guardian, 2020 | Article

"WHO conditionally backs Covid-19 vaccine trials that infect people"

Adam J. Kolber | Journal of Law and the Biosciences, 2020 | Article

"Why We (Probably) Must Deliberately Infect"

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.