Oxford University is preparing for an unconventional experiment in which healthy volunteers will be infected with the corona virus in order to shorten the process of developing the vaccine for the disease.

• Vaccine development at Oxford University // Photo: AP

Researchers at Oxford University are expected to begin a dramatic trial today (Sunday) in humans, who volunteered for the trial, in which they will be exposed to laboratory conditions for corona disease and treated with a vaccine developed by the university that is not in its final stages, the British Guardian reported.

In fact, this is a controversial experiment within the scientific world for the simple reason that it involves exposing healthy people to a disease for which there is currently no cure and which has been proven to be fatal to young people as well. There is usually an absolute taboo in the scientific world on such a move, but the corona has broken the taboo and now dozens of scientists in which Nobel laureates are calling for such vaccine trials in parallel with Phase 3 vaccines on drugs or vaccines in development.

Senior members of the international scientific community are now pushing to conduct trials in humans, even though there is no unequivocal proof that the vaccines developed are effective against the disease and also do not cause harm to humans. The reason for this push is the fact that research shows that young people are hardly affected by the disease and therefore their exposure to it is not so dangerous.

The university's announcement of the dramatic move comes today, just one day before publication in the scientific journal Lancet, in which the university will likely report on its vaccine success in its first phase involving about a thousand people. Apparently in the lab the vaccines developed by the university were able to teach the body cells how to fight the disease.

 In fact, the researchers have a vaccine that has also undergone the second phase and is found to be harmless to a small number of people. Therefore in a natural way a large number of people now had to be recruited to stage a large third test to see that the vaccine really does not harm the body systems and also fights disease in patients.

But the university is not waiting for the results of the third stage, but at the same time will expose people who have not contracted the disease and will treat them with the vaccine they have. According to Professor Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, "The information we have about the corona means that only 1 in 3,000 young people will have their kidney damaged and will need a kidney transplant as a result of the experiment. It is a very low risk and very beneficial."

What the researchers are currently doing is testing how many doses of vaccine should be given to a human body and how effective the substance developed in the injections is. This coincides with a third phase in which tens of thousands of patients from all over the world will be recruited to test the university's vaccine. In this way it will be possible at the same time to know both that the vaccine is good and how many doses to give from it by the end of the year.