1Day Sooner

Did You Know?

• The organization sponsored a Boston Vaccine Day event in September 2021.
• 1Day Africa, the African division of 1Day Sooner, focuses on accelerating vaccine development and promoting global access and distribution to vaccines.

Covid-19 challenge trials

1Day Sooner was founded by Josh Morrison, who had previously started the kidney donation organization Waitlist Zero, and Sophie Rose, a biology graduate from Stanford. They created the group after learning that human challenge trials involving healthy young volunteers could speed up the development of a COVID-19 vaccine. In March 2020, they launched a website where people could sign up to participate in such studies. By October 2020, more than 38,500 individuals had registered their interest. A survey of these prospective volunteers showed they were more inclined toward altruistic actions like donating to charity or giving blood compared to a control group. The study suggested this countered worries from some bioethicists that volunteers might be exploited. The organization saw challenge trials as a way to accelerate the creation of multiple vaccines, especially those intended for low-income countries, and to better understand COVID-19 immunity. If early vaccine candidates from 2020 had failed, 1Day Sooner believed challenge trials could help identify the most effective ones among the remaining options. The group argued that if such trials could provide a societal benefit, informed people should have the right to volunteer, even if it meant facing serious risks. In October 2020, the UK government announced it would fund COVID-19 human challenge trials; 1Day Sooner urged that the study protocols be made public before recruiting began. In August 2020, partly due to the group’s advocacy, the US government started preparing to produce a virus strain for potential challenge trials, though as of 2022 no such trials had taken place in the US. The organization also arranged an open letter in July 2020, signed by 125 scientists, academics, and public figures—including vaccinologists Adrian V. S. Hill and Stanley Plotkin, along with 15 Nobel laureates—that called on the National Institutes of Health to start immediate preparations for COVID-19 human challenge trials.