They could not even test themselves to see whether they developed immunity against SARS-Cov2. All we know is that someone sprayed something up their nose and hoped that it actually had the effect that they wanted. This is the catch.
Find a few thousand smart, maybe insane, biohackers. Give them each a $100k grant. Give them total immunity from FDA regulation. Free them from all the bureaucratic and ethical shackles that slow down establishment science. At a cost of $300 million, even a 1% chance that one of them figures out a way to double the rate of vaccination, constitutes a 1000%+ return on investment.
I haven’t heard of a single one of the available vaccines being held back by regulations, only the speed at which they could go through human trials.
The vaccine trials were drastically slowed down by the regulations against human challenge trials.
If you were dealing with a disease that is rare so that it might take a long time for enough people in phase II or III to get exposed to it naturally, an HCT might be able to cut the amount of time you need for phase II and maybe phase III.
With COVID, there should be enough people getting exposed naturally to make that unnecessary in phase III and probably in phase II.
What an HCT might do for a COVID vaccine is let you figure out early that your vaccine does not work. That might let you abandon an ineffective vaccine during phase II instead of not finding out it doesn't work until after you have spent a lot of time and money on phase III.
i.e. if your argument applies word for word against Semmelweis (who advocated hand-washing) or doubters against other earlier amateur vaccines, it it will fall victim to what we now know about those older cases, when the at-the-time experts were wrong.
In this case I wouldn't say that the reason this kind of research is valuable is anything related to medicine per se - but more that it can show the value of the much lower liability level he operates in, and how it means that amateurs can make massive cuts in preparing and defending from lawsuits. Example: if a company realized that only food-quality ingredients were required, not lab-quality, would it be worth it for them to justify that to the FDA and spend millions on it? probably not. My hypothesis for what's going on in general in medicine is this effect times a thousand, at every stage of development.
(a) The ability to produce hundreds of millions of doses.
(b) Tests that prove (as convincingly as we can) that the vaccine are safe.
I don't see any evidence that anyone has any idea how to do better at either (a) or (b).