Canadians signing up to be deliberately infected with flu virus to aid vaccine research - National Post

"It is a little bit on the edge to be working with these volunteers and trying to do good science and make sure we aren't doing any harm," said McGill University's Dr. Brian Ward, who is co-principal investigator of the influenza challenge study. Photo by Handout/McGill University Health CentreArticle contentCanadian scientists are purposely spraying an influenza virus into the noses of human volunteers, joining other nations in controlled human infection studies that, while speeding vaccine development in preparation for future pandemics, have also raised ethical uneasiness.

The experiment, one of the first of its kind in Canada, involves exposing consenting adults to a dose of a seasonal influenza virus, monitoring their symptoms and immune responses, administering antiviral drugs if necessary and keeping volunteers in special isolation “pods” for at least a week until they test negative.

The trials are designed to give researchers a better picture of how a pathogen behaves inside the human body to help fine-tune existing drugs or vaccines or develop new ones.

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The experiments have a long history in other parts of the world, used for decades to test potential treatments or vaccines for diseases like influence and malaria.

In 2020, when COVID was spreading rapidly, British scientists led COVID-19 human challenge trials, injecting young, healthy adults with candidate vaccines and then infecting them with SARS-CoV-2 when no proven treatments against COVID existed, raising ethical concerns over “the twin risks of exploitation and coercion.” Volunteers were paid the equivalent of C$6,500 for agreeing to be infected with COVID and then quarantined.

In Canada, Liberal MP Marcus Powlowski, a former emergency room doctor, presented a petition to Parliament, signed by several Canadian infectious diseases experts, calling on the government to announce a plan for similar COVID-19 challenge trials. The government responded that doing so would be particularly risky, given the limited treatments and unknown long-term effects of a potentially “severe and deadly” virus.

“Because SARS-CoV-2 was really new — we were discovering its biology and side effects in real time — I think there was a very reasonable hesitation on the part of many virologists, myself included, to the idea we should start using it as a challenge strain,” said Dr. Brian Ward, co-principal investigator of the influenza challenge study.