@Tootsey11
But surely the results are not going to be very helpful. They are only reinfecting the young and healthy.
Is it not more important to see how someone reacts who is say middle aged/elderly and how they cope with it, their immune system can tolerate it.
@Tootsey11 from their website - bolded bits are what they hope to learn from the study
Helen McShane, Professor of Vaccinology at the Department of Paediatrics, University of Oxford and Chief Investigator on the study said, ‘Challenge studies tell us things that other studies cannot because, unlike natural infection, they are tightly controlled. When we re-infect these participants, we will know exactly how their immune system has reacted to the first COVID infection, exactly when the second infection occurs, and exactly how much virus they got. As well as enhancing our basic understanding, this may help us to design tests that can accurately predict whether people are protected.
‘In phase two, we will explore two different things. First, we will define very carefully the baseline immune response in the volunteers, before we infect them. We will then infect them with the dose of virus chosen from the first study and measure how much virus we can detect after infection. We will then be able to understand what kind of immune responses protect against re-infection. Second, we will measure the immune response at several time points after infection so we can understand what immune response is generated by the virus.
‘A challenge study allows us to make these measurements very precisely because we know exactly when someone is infected. The information from this work will allow us to design better vaccines and treatments, and also to understand if people are protected after having COVID, and for how long.’
The study is funded by the Wellcome Trust. Shobana Balasingam, Vaccines Senior Research Advisor at Wellcome, said, ‘There are still many unknowns surrounding this virus and human infections studies can enable us to learn a lot about Covid-19. This study has the potential to transform our understanding by providing high-quality data on how our immune system responds to a second infection with this virus.
‘The findings could have important implications for how we handle Covid-19 in the future, and inform not just vaccine development but also research into the range of effective treatments that are also urgently needed. Keeping up the pace of scientific research and development, through crucial studies such as this remain the only way we will truly get ahead of this pandemic and bring it under control.’