It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. Near Ayal is a bioethicist with an idea that sounds

kind of risky at first. It's called a vaccine challenge trial. It would let us more quickly

find out whether coronavirus vaccines are effective, which could save thousands of lives

we're losing to the virus each day.

Today, nears TED 2020 conversation with head of Ted, Chris Anderson, helps us frame and consider

the idea and figure out whether the risks to the population are worth it.

There is a crazy idea out there that this might be a moment to deliberately infect groups of volunteers with the COVID-19 virus.

So let's hear from someone who's actually made that argument in a very compelling way.

He is the founder

and director of an amazing new centre at Rutgers University, the Centre for Population Level Bioethics.

And he published a paper making this argument recently. So to make it directly initially, and then we'll come in with questions,

please welcome near Ayal. Thank you very much, Chris, for the opportunity to present this.

With thousands of people dying globally every day from coronavirus and thousands more condemned to death by its disruptions.

Think about how much in life we could save by adopting testing methods for vaccines that are

accelerated. Suppose we could shorten time to roll out by one day or by several months.

Here's the conventional way to test the efficacy of vaccines, the slowest part of vaccine testing.

You distribute the participants to people who get the vaccine versus people who get to control,

and then they go back to their homes, and you wait.

You wait until there are enough exposures

out there to the virus to start seeing differences, meaningful differences between these two groups,

which might allow you to conclude that the vaccine is much more helpful for preventing infections

than the control. But my colleagues, Mark Lipsich, Peter Smith and myself, have proposed what would be potentially a faster method.

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