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Comment by andrewseanryan | Hacker News Reader

If there is a nearly harmless coronavirus going around, whether it is a common cold or previously unidentified virus (as the article suggests), that provides partial immunity to COVID, what is stopping us from purposefully infecting people with a less harmful illness to protect from COVID? Isn’t this how the first idea of vaccines came about with Cowpox and smallpox?

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As for what is stopping us:

1. Actually finding, isolating, and harvesting that virus, and

2. Proving that getting that virus doesn't cause some form of immune enhancement syndrome that would cause subsequent infection by a different coronavirus strain to result in more severe symptoms. (e.g., getting infected with one strain of Dengue fever causes lifelong immunity to that strain, but it also typically results in far more severe symptoms if you then catch a different strain). Immune system issues were identified with some earlier SARS vaccines but researchers discovered a likely way around it.

There was an article here a bit ago that proposed this.

Test to find asymptomatic people and track outcomes to find very mild strains. Then spread it. Glossing over some points here, but that was the idea.

> what is stopping us from purposefully infecting people with a less harmful illness to protect from COVID?

Something like will be illegal in (guessing) 4 separate ways.

It's too far outside too many boxes. Sit down!

Definitely too far if handled by government, but if the possibility exists as individual choices, some people would definitely go for it. Chickenpox parties are a thing, after all.

True.

You can also make a good argument for variolation. Which is to infect yourself with a small amount of viruses.

This will (ideally :) create a small infection that your immune system can beat off in time, and then you'll be immune after a minor time sick.

Apparently, people did this with smallpox in the pre vaccine era.

Isolating this virus variant, to boot

modern medical ethics. lack of efficiency is a trade off made to protect agency.

But the pandemic takes away a different form of agency, right? So it's not extremely clear cut ethically.

i'm not saying "modern medical ethics" is a good thing in this case (though I think some line is obviously essential to protect the rights of the individual in the face of abuse to cure the many) but that the formal and informal accords of the medical community that constitute that system of ethics is the reason no one (except maybe an authoritarian regime with no concern for individual liberties cough xinjiang) is talking about infecting healthy people to test vaccines or build up herd immunity.

this is independent of the multitude of evidence that this is bad for non-hospitalized people too https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/934851 https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/07/08/from-lung-scarring-to-h...

Because that's a lot more work than making a vaccine that allows the body to target SARS-CoV2 directly.

That's literally a vaccine.

This. Nothing stops us from doing this. Creating an attenuated virus vaccine or stumbling across one in nature is just two different ways of getting the same thing.

Once you have it, you still need to do the long 3-phase approval that normally takes many years (and now takes perhaps 9-18 months because it’s an emergency). But it’s still a vaccine.

The question perhaps is could we stop people from having their own “parties” with people identified to have the less dangerous immunity-causing virus? Probably not. I wouldn’t go to one though.

That's literally how herd immunity works. People with no or mild symptoms go out and spread the virus, people with heavy symptoms stay home. Virus is encouraged evolutionarily to be as non-symptomatic as possible.

Unfortunately we have totally broken this with our lockdown strategy, which has meant that heavily symptomatic people are allowed out to get medical treatment and spread the virus in clinic and hospitals, whilst everyone else is forced to stay home.

People with heavy symptoms don't infect other people with a virus that gives heavy symptoms.

The exact same virus can give one person heavy symptoms and another person light symptoms.

The immune system plays a bigger part than the strain of virus.

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