[pritovido]

For me the testing process feels painful and slow. I believe the best way to know the illness is through controlled infection of volunteers. I would have volunteered myself.

I have been around people risking their lives in B.A.S.E jumps, scuba diving or aircraft acrobatics.

If people can risk their own lives for the adrenaline rush, I don't know why they can't risk their lives for the improvement of all humanity.

[usrusr]

> I have been around people risking their lives in B.A.S.E jumps, scuba diving or aircraft acrobatics.

Those are more risks of a quick end doing something you love, which is much more attractive than a risk of ruining a long life ever after, which being on the wrong end of a failed medical experiment very much is. If we somehow had cultural conventions and processes about controlled opt-out from life then this might be different, but we don't. I don't know how those cultural mechanisms would look and I don't know if they would even be possible without doing more harm than good, but I do know that we clearly don't have them.

But the real issue with challenge trials is that they just don't tell you that much as the trial group would undoubtedly be extremely biased. Basic validation can be done in a dish, in programmerese that's the suite of unit tests, and it can be done well enough to skip from safety tests (that don't involve the virus) right to observed staged deployment. The main thing challenge tests would add is that they would be a big lure for reckless people who try to be faster by skimping on the initial dish tests that are the majority of development (the equivalent of skipping unit tests).

[kube-system]

There are plenty of people who are willing to risk their own life for controlled infection trials.

The issue is finding professionals and professional institutions willing to risk the lives of others to administer those trials.