U.K. to infect healthy people with COVID for world's first "human challenge trial"

Details: The government-funded effort will, in the first stage, expose up to 90 young adults to the coronavirus "in a safe and controlled environment" to evaluate the amount of virus needed to cause infection.

• The government hopes in later stages to quickly study vaccines and be able to compare them against one another.

What they're saying: Some experts question whether such a study is necessary, given the existence of highly-effective vaccines.

• But others say that new vaccines will continue to be developed, and will need to be tested.
• The human challenge trials could "give ourselves the potential to test new vaccines very quickly, and that’s really the primary purpose of this effort," Robert Read, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Southampton, told the Post.