Let's Take Some Modest Risks

Given the certain economic disruptions we are going through, as well as the certain continuing loss of Human life, if this is not the time to try something risky, when would be the time?

We could be out of this fairly quickly if we took some reasonable risks and got out of the mind-set of normal drug approvals.

Why do vaccines take so long to develop? Ideally, you want to stimulate a strong immune response but also not kill or sicken people who take the vaccine. This takes time. Once you find the right answer (what exactly are you giving and at what concentration) you need to scale-up production. This is fine for diseases that have been constant problems and maybe Covid will fall into this category. What is likely is that Covid will burn itself out long before any vaccine is available, if we follow the normal template.

What I suggest is a kind of variolation, but with much more control and far less risk and which could provide almost immediate (modest) benefits.

Viruses can be made in cell culture by transfecting with plasmids which contain the viral genome. Lately this has been done and modified by taking out some piece of the viral genome such that any viral particle made in this process can not replicate but can still enter a target cell. This is the basis of viral gene therapy.

What I suggest is to use the same technology to make Covid-19 virus but leave-out some essential function, I think the reverse transcriptase gene makes sense. We could widely administer dilute dosages at pilot scale. The risk would be low and while there would likely be low immunity, it would increase the viral load needed to cause illness and would allow for higher dosages to be safe once production ramps up to the point where they are available.

A crash program could be providing low dosages in a month and higher ones in three.

Useful and relevant links:

http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/lockdown-socialism-will-collapse/
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.12.20062943v1.full.pdf
https://unherd.com/thepost/coming-up-epidemiologist-prof-johan-giesecke-shares-lessons-from-sweden/