International consortium of Researchers Embarking on Human Challenge Studies with SARS-CoV-2
Humans ARE the guinea pigs for a supposedly highly deadly virus or maybe the virus was not as deadly as it was made out to be.
And we were told SARS-CoV-2 was a highly deadly virus….
Source: https://cepi.net/global-consortium-plans-coordinated-human-challenge-studies-hunt-transmission-blocking-coronavirus
An international consortium of researchers specializing in human challenge studies is embarking on a US$57 million project to develop advanced, virus-blocking coronavirus vaccines that could stop SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses from infecting people in the first place.
You read that correctly, they plan to intentionally infect humans with SARS-CoV-2 virus. But this isn’t the first time humans were used as guinea pigs.
History of human challenge studies
Human challenge studies involve researchers deliberately exposing healthy volunteers to pathogens that cause infectious diseases. People are typically given a small dose of a pathogen through oral ingestion, inhalation, or injection. Medical professionals then closely monitor participants to observe how the body responds and whether treatment is effective in managing or preventing disease in a controlled setting, and during times when there is low prevalence in the general population. This allows researchers to monitor how the body responds to the disease, and to test possible new treatments and vaccines. However, benefits must be balanced against other considerations, such as health risks to volunteers and other ethical challenges.
Human challenge studies have been used since the late 1800s. In the past, scientists have deliberately exposed volunteers to diseases like typhoid and cholera to test vaccines. I won’t even go into the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study that took place from 1932 to 1972.
In researching this I came across human challenge studies for RSV, influenza, measles, malaria, dengue fever, shigella, Escherichia coli, and norovirus. A systematic review of human challenge studies published between 1980 and 2021 found a total of 15,046 challenged participants were described in 308 studies.
There were 28 pathogen categories (Table A below), with the most commonly studied being Plasmodium spp (73 studies, 1689 participants), influenza viruses (45 studies, 3536 participants), and rhinovirus (43 studies, 4332 participants). Studies investigating Plasmodium spp had the greatest number of challenged participants with severe adverse events (SAEs), with 7 SAEs (of 23 in all non-rechallenge studies) occurring among 1129 participants in 52 studies. Studies investigating norovirus had the greatest proportion of SAEs to number challenged, with 4 SAEs occurring among 163 participants in 3 studies.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9938741/
Overall, the number of challenge studies has been increasing each decade. Interestingly, NIAID was assigned lead responsibility within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for civilian biodefense research in 2003 with a focus on research and early development of medical countermeasures against terrorist threats from infectious diseases. Not sure if there is a connection or it is just an interesting coincidence.
This won’t be the first human challenge study with SARS-CoV-2
In 2021, the UK approved a study in which healthy volunteers were intentionally inoculated with SARS-CoV-2. Researchers claimed that every precaution was taken to minimize risk. Meanwhile government leaders and public health professionals were telling the general public that this virus was highly deadly. At the time, COVID-19 had no known treatment or cure, and the long-term consequences of an infection were largely unknown. This put the scientists in charge of the British study in largely uncharted ethical territory. The age restrictions also may make it difficult to translate the findings to older adults or people with pre-existing conditions, whose immune responses might be different and who are the target group for treatments and vaccines.
Despite all this hundreds of people signed up to volunteer for the study. After being exposed to the virus, the participants were isolated for two weeks in the hospital. For that and the year’s worth of follow-up appointments that were planned, they were paid 4,500 pounds, or about $6,200.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01780-9
The findings showed that even low doses of the virus can cause Covid-19 infection, and that young adults are more likely to experience mild or asymptomatic cases. They also found that lateral flow tests (LFTs) are a reassuringly reliable indicator of whether infectious virus is present (i.e., whether they are a likely to be able to transmit virus to other people).
I’m not certain putting healthy people at risk in this type of study was needed to show any of what the researchers discovered.
Scientists have deliberately infected people with Zika virus
Source: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05123222
Zika virus is a mosquito-borne virus that comes from the Ziika Forest of Uganda, where the virus was first isolated in 1947. Since the 1950s, it has been known to occur within a narrow equatorial belt from Africa to Asia. The vertebrate hosts of the virus were primarily monkeys in a so-called enzootic mosquito-monkey-mosquito cycle, with only occasional transmission to humans. Before 2007, Zika "rarely caused recognized 'spillover' infections in humans, even in highly enzootic areas". In 2007 the first major outbreak occurred on the island of Yap in Micronesia. From 2007 to 2016, the virus spread eastward, across the Pacific Ocean to the Americas, leading to the 2015–2016 Zika virus epidemic in Brazil and other Latin American countries.
The infection, known as Zika fever or Zika virus disease, often causes no or only mild symptoms, similar to a very mild form of dengue fever. Around 80% of cases are estimated to be asymptomatic. Symptomatic cases are usually mild and can resemble dengue fever. Symptoms may include fever, red eyes, joint pain, headache, and a maculopapular rash. Symptoms generally last less than seven days. It has not caused any reported deaths during the initial infection.
Zika was thought to be able to spread from a pregnant woman to her baby possibly resulting in microcephaly, severe brain malformations, and other birth defects. Although, this connection has been under scrutiny and one doctor believes this was used to terrify people and cause panic. You can read more about it in his book “Overturning Zika: The Pandemic That Never Was.”
Image of a baby with microcephaly (left) compared to a normal baby (right). This is one of the potential effects of Zika virus. Signs of microcephaly may develop a few months after birth.
In 2016, as the mosquito-borne Zika virus spread through the Americas and cases of infected women having brain-damaged babies mounted. From the beginning of the outbreak in 2015 until the start of this year, Brazil had about half of all 800,000 suspected and confirmed Zika cases in the Americas, according to the Pan American Health Organization in Washington, D.C. As of August 2017 the number of new Zika virus cases in the Americas had fallen dramatically.
Source: https://www.science.org/content/article/massive-zika-vaccine-trial-struggles-researchers-revive-plan-intentionally-infect
The World Health Organization suggested that priority should be to develop inactivated vaccines and other non-live vaccines, which are safe to use in pregnant women. As of March 2016, 18 companies and institutions were developing vaccines against Zika, but they stated a vaccine was unlikely to be widely available for about 10 years. In 2018 one such vaccine trial was underway at 17 sites in nine countries, but it faced an unexpected, and ironic, challenge.
"Right now, there are no infections, and certainly not enough to even think about an efficacy signal at this point," says Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, which launched the $110M trial.
Further complicating the trial, many people throughout Latin America and the Caribbean have already been infected with Zika and recovered, which has left them immune to the virus and hence ineligible for vaccine trials. This is proof that having been infected and recovering from the infection confers “natural” immunity to a virus.
Because there are no ongoing outbreaks, researchers were not able to test vaccine candidates in phase 3 field trials. The lack of cases meant the only way to test vaccines was to develop safe human challenge trials. Of course Dr. Fauci supported the use of human challenge studies with Zika virus.
"If they're careful, we have no problems supporting it," Fauci says.
In 2023, researchers completed the first ever human challenge trial for Zika virus, deliberately infecting volunteers to identify strains of the virus that can be safely used to test vaccines against the mosquito-borne pathogen. The study enrolled only women.
A total of 28 women participated in the study, admitting them to the Johns Hopkins Center for Immunization Research inpatient unit and assigning them to one of two cohorts. In each cohort, 10 women were infected with the virus strains and 4 received a placebo. All participants receiving the viral strains developed lab-confirmed Zika infections, with mild illness, and were hospitalized until they were completely free of the virus.
Researchers have performed a similar controlled Zika infection study in male volunteers who will remain as inpatients until they clear the virus, specifically to assess how long it remains infectious in semen.
One wonders why we would need a vaccine for a virus that has largely disappeared.
Hepatitis C could be next…
In a joint statement published in the Lancet in November 2023, 121 clinicians and researchers stated they believe that human challenge studies among adult volunteers will be critical in the development of hepatitis C vaccines.
Hepatitis C is a viral infection that is thought to cause liver swelling, called inflammation. Hepatitis C may lead to serious liver damage. But many people with hepatitis C don't know they have it. Symptoms appear only after the virus damages the liver enough to cause them. Long-term infection with the hepatitis C virus is called chronic hepatitis C. Acute hepatitis C infection doesn't always become chronic. Some people clear the infection from their bodies after the acute phase. Left untreated, chronic hepatitis C can cause serious health problems including liver disease, liver failure, liver cancer, and even death.
Hepatitis C virus is a bloodborne virus and most infection occur through exposure to blood from unsafe injection practices, unsafe health care, unscreened blood transfusions, injection drug use and sexual practices that lead to exposure to blood.
Direct-acting antiviral medicines can cure more than 95% of persons with hepatitis C infection. That being said, researchers at the University of Oxford, Imperial College London and Ghent University received more than £1million in funding for a hepatitis C controlled human infection model.
Source: https://oxfordbrc.nihr.ac.uk/funding-announced-for-hepatitis-c-controlled-human-infection-model-trial/
The University of Oxford’s Professor Eleanor Barnes, the lead scientist designing the hepatitis C CHIM in the UK, said: “There is an enormous, coordinated effort currently to develop an effective vaccine in recognition of the ongoing severe harms of hepatitis C globally.”
Dr Harvey Alter, 2020 Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of the hepatitis C virus, said: “I believe a hepatitis C human challenge model is our best shot at developing a vaccine in the near future. Such a model is possible because current hepatitis C treatments are so highly effective.”
You can’t make this stuff up. The rationale for doing human challenge studies is that the level of cases of illness is so low they can't do vaccine trials in the general populations because people may not be exposed to the pathogen of interest. If exposure is so rare then why would we need vaccines for those pathogens?
Do you think the health risks of human challenge studies outweigh the potential benefits? Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
I love the photo of the nurse or doc pipetting (presumably virus) into the nose of a “guinea pig.” I remember when they did that challenge trial for SC2. Insane. The “pandemic” more than anything was a worldwide shift in bioethics that is still mindboggling. Bad and unreproducible science is already a challenge but the pandemic brought it to a whole new scale. There are primate facilities in the us that literally specialize in respiratory virus challenge…why are we doing these studies in humans. I could totally hear Fauci and others justify deaths or harm in these challenge trials, yet be completely hypocritical when it comes to deaths from covid in a public health sense. That’s because when they invest $110M in a taxpayer funded vx program for a virus that is hardly around, they have to have something to justify it. Love the ESC image with facts.
The W.H,O, keep trying to make more & more vaccines all the time. God made our bodies to heal them selves naturally. I do not like the idea of the playing around with any people in these studies. The covid shots were not an actually a vaccine, but dangerous ingredients that were not listed. Many people died from the shots, not covid itself! The hospitals were encouraged to list all deaths as actual COVID deaths instead of the real reason, THE SHOTS! I do not think the W.H.O. should be involved in our health affairs! It is all a money making business for all the drug company involved! Never again should the world be involved in this corrupt regime again! We do not want or trust this TYRANNY in our lives any longer. PERIOD