UK to start deliberately infecting healthy adults to test Covid treatments

London, Feb 17 (efe-epa).- The United Kingdom will begin clinically testing Covid-19 vaccines on healthy adult volunteers, the British Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis) said Wednesday.

The UK will be the first country in the world to carry out this kind of test.

Starting in March, around 90 healthy volunteers between the ages of 18 and 30 will be infected with coronavirus in a controlled and safe environment to discover the minimum amount of the virus needed to cause infection and analyze initial auto-immune responses and person-to-person transmission.

They will be injected with the variant that has been in the country since March 2020, which proved to be low-risk for healthy young people, the statement added.

Studies involving healthy people who were deliberately infected, instead of waiting for them to become infected naturally, have already been used to develop vaccines and treatments for diseases such as malaria, typhoid fever, common cold, flu, or norovirus. EFE-EPA

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