Name: The people who get paid to get sick
Uploaded: 2026-01-18T17:43:04.000Z
Duration: 6 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

While I was researching this video, there was a brief moment where I thought actually I might volunteer myself to get infected with some disease here.

But unfortunately, spending a couple of weeks in quarantine and taking a small but genuine risk with my health wasn't something I could reasonably afford to do.

Fortunately, there are people willing to do that and some of them are inside here in this former hotel in East London, taking part in a challenge trial for rsv, a respiratory virus.

So with suitable precautions, we're going to take a look.

What we're essentially doing is we are recruiting healthy volunteers and we're deliberately exposing them to a virus.

We're giving them a virus that we know they're going to recover from.

But the idea is by making them sick, we can then test if a vaccine or an antiviral is efficacious at protecting against that disease.

We're not taking those vulnerable populations which might become severely ill with the viruses.

They are healthy such that we can recruit them, we can inoculate them with a virus, and

they would be expected to recover naturally on their own from the viruses that we're giving them.

Half will get the placebo, half will get the vaccine, and

we'll typically come back in about one month later, which is enough time to get response to the vaccine and then all of them will be exposed to the challenge virus.

Pharmaceutical companies, before they come to us, they would have tested to make sure that that vaccine or antiviral is safe in humans first, but

without the disease, then they're ready to do human viral challenge studies, which we then bring the next element, which is the disease itself.

So recruiting a volunteer and making sure they're suitable for the trial really does fit into two categories.

One is, are they healthy enough in their body, their heart, their lungs, are they functioning normally and truly healthy from a medical perspective?

Similarly, they are going to be quarantined for up to two weeks at a time.

So we want them to be happy in that environment and able to cope in that environment.

So both their bodily and their mental health capacity are both vital.

This is what a quarantine room looks like from the inside.

Not in use right now, obviously, and it will be fully deep cleaned again after I leave.

But yeah, this will be someone's home for a couple of weeks while they're being paid to risk their health.

Any viral infection, flu, Covid, whatever, does carry a risk of long term effects.

And there are serious ethical questions about whether it is right to pay someone to risk their health, but

to Be fair, there are much more difficult jobs that also involve physical risk and the chance of bodily injury, and

that usually don't involve sitting in a room with a TV and a PlayStation.

So the volunteers who come onto the trial actually are compensated for their time, and

it's important that we phrase it like that.

Four and a half thousand pounds would be the typical amount that's set in conjunction with the Research Ethics committee to make sure people on our trials are compensated for their time.

And similarly to any other trial in the uk.

You are exactly two stories below me right now.

We're obviously not allowed to talk in person.

I don't want to say better than when I actually came in before, but

So not everybody will become infected on these studies.

So, yes, some of them will feel completely well for the entire time, and that's expected.

What we're trying to do, of course, is to.

To give the minimum amount of virus to cause a reproducible amount of disease.

The outcome of that, normally is that means not 100% of people will be infected, but

There are quite a few organisations around the world who run similar trials.

This one is descended from the UK government's Common Cold unit, which started just after the Second World War and ran experiments for nearly half a century.

They didn't cure the common cold, obviously, but they did identify what we now call coronaviruses.

Back then, they'd run adverts in Newspapers offering 10 days free holiday and travel expenses paid.

The catch being, of course, that you would be in quarantine and infected with something during that holiday.

These days, the advertising is a bit more straightforward.

Initially, I found out about it on Google and then I saw more Instagram ads.

You know what that is for getting the virus?

You basically lay down and they use a pet with a diluted virus in it that's dropped into each of your nostrils.

It's quite daunting when you're laid there and you've got a team of people around you in clinical care and you're receiving a virus.

It was a scary place to be in, albeit for a short amount of time.

There was one part of challenge trials that it took me a while to figure out.

Somewhere they have to manufacture the viruses that they're infecting volunteers with to specific standards of quantity and quality, the same as you would for any other scientific supply.

So how do you make and transport things like the common cold?

It would start by taking a clinical swab from someone who has contracted the disease naturally in the community.

Then that swab is then grown in tissue culture and amplified up, all done under very controlled conditions.

Now, this process of producing human channel's virus is actually really similar to the way a lot of vaccines are made.

You need to grow up the virus first and then you inactivate the virus or you denature the virus in some way and that becomes the vaccine.

So that early part of the pathway of producing a vaccine is very, very similar actually to how we produce challenge viruses.

They've got days or weeks left in one of these rooms, depending on which trial they're in.

But I did have one more question before I went.

We've seen a lot of drugs and vaccines accelerated through the work that we've done, Channel studies.

They're being used really to understand very early on, have I got a proof of concept?

Can I see if my, my drug is working and give me confidence to take it forward or the reverse?

Can I kill it quickly and then they can put their money into, into other better drugs or redevelopment?