Volunteers in London are to be infected with coronavirus early next year, in the world’s first Covid-19 “human challenge trials”. The project, first disclosed in the Financial Times last month, was announced publicly on Tuesday morning with an initial ￡33.6m of government funding.

The aim is to speed up vaccine development by infecting participants with coronavirus in a secure clinic, a month or so after vaccination, rather than waiting for them to be exposed as they go about their normal lives in the community — as happens in conventional clinical trials.

Before that, healthy volunteers aged 18 to 30 will take part in a “virus characterisation” study at the Royal Free Hospital’s special biocontainment suite to discover how people respond to infection.