Next Pandemic we should have Challenge Trials

Covid-19 is long enough away now that we should look at what happened and decide what we want to to next time there is a pandemic. One thing we could do is challenge trials of vaccines. This would have sped up vaccine deployment hugely and saved time and huge amounts of money.

Reading books like Vaxxers there were several vaccines ready for early testing in the first weeks of 2020. But it still took until December for the vaccine to be approved. This is because if you have tens of thousands of people in your vaccine trial but tiny amounts of the disease out there it takes a long time for enough people in the vaccinated and unvaccinated sides of the trial to get infected to be able to judge that the vaccine works. 

If instead after the initial testing on a small number of people just to make sure no reactions are common a challenge trial took place. Where after vaccination both arms of a larger phase 3 trial are deliberately infected with the virus you gather enough people in the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups to judge the effectiveness in a matter of weeks not months. 

These sorts of challenge trials are much more common now but it is the sort of thing that agreeing about now will make it much easier and more trustworthy when the challenge trial based vaccine experiments happen. 

Back of the envelope with these sorts of trials a vaccine could have been tested by the time lockdowns started to happen. Even if this was just for medical professionals initially. and rolled out to older people shortly afterward this could have avoided a huge number of issues