It is not risky to go looking for a naturally attenuated virus. This is the first step that needs to happen.
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.
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!
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.
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.
It just seems more practical than hail-mary posting on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22810639
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 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 whole argument about attenuated strains being a possible shortcut seems to be a variation of the "natural medicine" fallacy.
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.
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.
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.