If reports are to be believed, young people who have already been infected by the Coronavirus will receive £5,000 if they agree to re-expose themselves to the virus.
Volunteers will be under quarantine for 17 days and a hospital will take care of them until they are not infectious enough to affect others around them.
The idea behind this audacious experiment is to find out how their immune system reacts to the virus again. Volunteers will be of 18-30 age group who were former Covid patients and they will be exposed to the virus in a controlled environment.
Termed as the University of Oxford's "human challenge", this trial “hopes to discover what dose of coronavirus is needed to cause a reinfection, and what this may mean for developing protective immunity against the disease,” Sky News reported.
Recent research has gone viral on the internet, sensitising people that those who have already been infected are still very much vulnerable to the virus and reinfection. This hypothesis is based on studies in the US, indicating that 10% of participants ended up getting reinfected.
This can be treated as a part or extension of “human challenge studies” which have been conducted in the past for diseases including malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, cholera and flu.
The process will involve constant monitoring and regular check-ups in the year after reinfection will help establish the immune response generated by the virus - and this could contribute to the creation of better vaccines, and a greater understanding of how long immunity lasts.
It is being reported that the original strain of Covid-19 from Wuhan virus will be used so that scientists can learn more about it and other variants. The study will take phase in two phases. The first phase will involve 64 healthy volunteers, in order to establish the lowest dose of virus which can take hold and start replicating. After fixing the exact amount of the dose, the virus will be used to infect participants in the second phase of the study, which is expected to start in the summer.
