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Comment by jka | Hacker News Reader

This seems risky but worth consideration.

Can you provide peer / concept review from virologists?

A few items of feedback:

- You could use a title that includes a distinct word to identify your proposed solution: "Using accentuated COVID-19 strains as a (possible) solution". This helps people to communicate and refer to the idea concisely.

- The top three paragraphs may be known to your target audience; consider allowing the reader to get straight to your point.

- It took me a while (certainly to the Q&A section) to grasp that attenuated virus strains are different from dangerous ones. Explaining this (perhaps in a brief sentence, then repeated and elaborated in a more detailed paragraph) near the top may also help.

- Further references (especially peer review from respected authors) may help gain traction. Decision makers can be -- sensibly -- risk averse in global crises like these.

Good luck!

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I am a virologist - well I have published many papers in this area. I have a PhD in molecular microbiology and have been a tenured professor (I now work in the biotech sector). This is not intended to be a scientific paper, but a layman’s summary of the idea so non-technical people can understand the idea.

It is not risky to go looking for a naturally attenuated virus. This is the first step that needs to happen.

Thank you. I certainly get the sense from the article and your comments that you are well-informed.

My suggestion is really one around building trust - it'd help to have others in the same scientific field confirm and/or question the approach.

This is exactly what I want to do. I want to collaborate with those in the position to go looking for one of these attenuated viruses.

It looks like you need to find someone who can help make your post feel more professional - perhaps Ask HN for help or just directly email one of the clued up people here that are open to cold emails (patio11?).

I almost didn’t read it because the title sounds too generically woowoo, and the domain you are using seemed unprofessional. Then on reading the article, you didn’t give your background, an irrelevant picture of a painting opens the article, and the sidebar of your article topics are all over the shop. Sorry for being so negative: it is much easier to find reasons why something doesn’t feel right, and I’m not a fantastic marketer so I can’t offer you fixes I could predict would help.

It seems like a really good idea (are there others that have suggested it?), but I suspect it needs to be more convincing with a bit of repackaging if you want to push it.

Maybe add comments to those 2 papers with an “elevator pitch” or a request for other relevant info, and link to an improved post, and it should bubble up and find the right people to evaluate it.

Edit: also perhaps get your idea onto the various Covid daily link sites: good ideas should bubble up. Use Twitter to relevant people. Pass the idea to this guy who writes fantastically and has audience: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

Good luck, we need some!

The site is my personal blog. I thought about writing a more technical level paper, but what I wanted to accomplish is to get this idea in front of a non-scientific audience who can think outside the box (like many of those on HN).

A standard scientific paper will sink without a trace -scientists are just too conservative to take something like this seriously. I hate to say it, but the people who will make something like this a reality are the tech billionaires of this world.

The tech billionaires of this world will not fund anything based on a layman's explanation. They want to fund ideas based on reliable research. The Gates Foundation is staffed with tons of specialists for this reason.

I think that if you really believe your idea has some merit, you should still write a paper. After that you can blog about it for any audience out there and maybe write a follow-up. You're a professional, you know how it works.

I most likely will write such a paper, but the first thing is to get those that can make this happen interested. They are not going to be reading a scientific paper.

> It looks like you need to find someone who can help make your post feel more professional - perhaps Ask HN for help or just directly email one of the clued up people here that are open to cold emails (patio11?).

It would probably have the opposite effect. This way it looks like a probably serious scientist wrote an idea that is probably worth considering on his personal website / blog.

If you give the site the "Hacker News treatment", I suspect that it will immediately look like "somebody with funding is trying to sell me on an idea for some reason". This stuff might work for naive consumers, but naive consumers don't matter here. I am sure that this post is already being shared among experts, and they are the ones who need to decide if this idea has merit or not. Throwing marketing bs at them will probably just hurt the cause.

This seems like a pretty good idea (good enough that certainly there must already be people working on it) so it seems like if you could find and contact them, maybe you could contribute to their efforts?

It just seems more practical than hail-mary posting on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22810639

Well I hope other are working on it, but I haven’t found much evidence of this so far. HN has a pretty diverse audience including a lot of scientists like me.

It would probably be helpful to mention that at the start or end of the post. Clear, non-inflated credentials/background with links. (I sometimes see this in italics at the top)

It is not really my style to boast about myself, but yes I should at least provide a link to the about me page.

Sort of a weird ask, but as a real, no shit, virologist, what do you think about changing your messaging to make content more accessible to lazy readers?

I have some half baked ideas about tradeoffs in infection rate and fatality, but I'm worse than a layman, I'm a layman with an opinion.

I'd sorta thought a virus could be real lethal(like ebola) ore real infectious(like a cold) but it's kinda hard to be both at the same time.

it _seems_ like there's a mapping between getting read (infection rate) and convincing people (fatality).

to be super explicit, is messaging a virus? is there a tradeoff in how the message spreads vs how convincing it is?

You've probably got other things to do, but it seems like there's a parallel there, even if imperfect, that's worth looking at. If you got a minute, I'd love to read your thoughts.

Viruses don’t really care about thing like death rate, they just care about how effectively they are spread from person to person (viruses don’t really care about anything, but I am describing how they appear to act if they had a mind).

In general the less deadly viruses spread better as dead people are not able to spread the virus around as well as living people. The general trend is for viruses to become less deadly over time, but it can take a long time for this to happen.

Spread rate would also need to stay in a certain range for a virus to stick around. Spread too fast and there won't be a second wave. The herd immunity effect gives this system some self-balancing properties, but there's surely a tipping point where even that won't help a speeding virus to survive.

> is there a tradeoff in how the message spreads vs how convincing it is?

That doesn't make any sense, viruses that are more fatal don't spread well because dead people are not good spreaders. Very sick people are also less capable spreaders than someone walking around with a persistent cough. Someone who's convinced would be MORE likely to spread a message.

I think it would help to include your bio/qualifications in the blogpost.

Done.

Wouldn't an attenuated strain vaccine still require years of paperwork and clinical trials too?

Yes. This is why I am suggesting an alternative. It is all in the blog post.

This is an attenuated live vaccine, though. So the risks are similar or worse than just doing a real, engineered vaccine.

If it's mere paperwork, we can solve that with a regular vaccine just as fast. And the regular vaccine would be more likely to be safe, even at an early stage. (Note: I'm a rando, not a medical or biological professional.)

if bureacracy held up the spread of a live coronavirus, we wouldn't be in this mess

The proposal is to intentionally apply a live virus to people, so absolutely there are bureaucratic barriers to this (and for good reason). There is no a priori reason why this should have less red tape than a dead virus.

If we're just going to ignore any regulations and bureaucracy for a live virus (like this proposes), we can do the same for a dead virus.

The reason why this should be able to advance faster than a normal vaccine approach is that we will have epidemiological data that it is safe in humans. Sure it would be nice to have double blinded placebo controlled data, but good epidemiology data is still data on which a regulatory decision could be made. In the current circumstances I think this will satisfy the regulators.

It would only be logical to require a "vaccine-strain" that has the capability for uncontrolled spread to go through much more stringent trials and paperwork than one that is limited by distribution.

The whole argument about attenuated strains being a possible shortcut seems to be a variation of the "natural medicine" fallacy.

Except the experiment has been done for us already by nature. We are not doing the experiment, just observing what has already happened. Sure you would not be able to make a strain of unknown attenuation in the lab and spread it around (this would be very dangerous), but you can use the data that nature has provided us. I am proposing we go and collect that data.

Adding to this:

While you do not recommend ZJ01 due to the potential for it to mutate back into the original strain, isn't it also quite dangerous?

That would likely remain a primary concern for many - we musn't cause large scale harm intentionally. And if we don't know what effects a strain has, it makes it ethically difficult to distribute.

From the ZJ01 Medrxiv[1] page you link to:

"We found, in our 788 confirmed COVID-19 patients, the decreased rate of severe/critical type, increased liver/kidney damage and prolonged period of nuclear acid positivity during virus dissemination, when compared with Wuhan."

[1] - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.10.20033944v...

This just rules our using ZJ01. There are other attenuated strains out there that will have deletion mutations that can’t mutate back. We need to go find them.

Sorry if it's a stupid question, but hypothetically, would we be able to engineer rather than find a harmless strain of coronavirus with the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2?

If I understand correctly, antigens identify the virus by its S proteins. Would we be able to use the same methods <a href='https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985'>as in this paper</a> to replace the S protein in a harmless cold-like coronavirus with the S protein of SARS-CoV-2, and would then the resulting immunity defend against SARS-CoV-2?

This is not a stupid question. Yes we could engineer such a strain, the problem would be testing it given we would not be able to predict how dangerous it was.

Having identified a harmless strain, and presuming regulatory agencies are too slow to be useful, then what?

Send people infected with the harmless version around, after lockdown ends in a month or two, to crowded places?

Would greater virulence be a desirable quality in our reduced strain?

Well if the regulatory agencies decided that they weren’t going to act then I suspect there would be a grass roots level spread of the strain anyway. This would be the worst way to use such a strain, but I don’t think it would be possible to stop this happening.

I don’t think we will get to that point. If we collect good data from the natural spread of any attenuated strain then I think the regulatory authorities will allow its use on the basis of this data.

I hear the phrase "peer review" thrown around so much it's reaching semantic satiation. I get that it's the way respected science gets done, but it's also the laziest possible critique because you're literally asking for someone else to think about it for you.

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