As a virologist, I find it deeply concerning that some are proposing to expose healthy people to low doses of #COVID19 to make them immune. The public should know that, while there's a seemingly rational basis for this suggestion rooted in history, it's dangerous...
Hundreds of years ago, before there were vaccines and smallpox was killing 30% of those it infected, it was discovered in Asia that scratching a bit of ground up scab from patient w/ a mild case into the skin of an uninfected person would give them an infection...
...that was milder and had only a 1-2% mortality rate. That's better than 30% at a time when people didn't know how to avoid smallpox altogether and before there was any notion of a vaccine. This practice was called "variolation". Here's a quick reference. nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/sma…
Variolation not only still killed but was also dangerous because infection could spread out of control to others & be just as deadly... it's still smallpox! The practice spread throughout the world in 1700s. Vaccination, however, means immunizing w/ something other than...
...the same pathogen you want to protect them from. The first vaccination was using live cowpox (didn't cause serious disease in most people) to generate immunity that also shielded them from cowpox but also smallpox. w/ similar vaccines, we eradicated smallpox globally in 1980.
Here's a crude analogy: A vaccine shows the police a picture of a bad guy (who can clone himself) so they can recognize and stop an approaching evil clone army from taking over the city. Variolation means dropping one bad guy on outskirts of the city w/ the expectation that...
...he'll be caught & photographed before the evil clone army (the virus) takes over the city. Sometimes the bad guy runs into the city, replicates, and takes over (death), then invades other cities (other people).
By comparison, a vaccination could be introducing the bad guy's comparatively mild mannered, petty-criminal brother (e.g. cowpox) to the neighborhood for the police to find, though he can still do some harm. But more modern vaccines are even safer... no criminals at all.
Extending this analogy, modern vaccines may involved killed virus, eg dropping body of bad guy clone on doorstep of police station. Or might just have viral proteins w/ immune stimulant, which is like planting bad guy's head on a spike w/ neon lights in front of police station.
Or it might involve just injecting mRNA encoding the viral proteins, which is like giving police instructions on how to create a harmless clones of bad guy's body parts and face to study up close. This analogy is getting a bit absurd and doesn't do modern technology justice...
...but the point is that modern vaccines typically educate the immune system without risking actually putting any dangerous pathogens into people. That's what dozens of companies are now working to create for Covid19.
We have no idea what would happen if you exposed people intentionally to low doses. We don't know how low those doses would need to be to cause sufficiently mild disease that it would be "safe" to do so. People might have a lower chance of death, but their disease might still....
...land them in the hospital, taking up precious beds. Maybe if we had really great drugs that would blunt the infection, you might consider exposing some people to covid & then treating them so their symptoms stay mild. And it would have to be...
...done in a controlled environment, under clinical trial protocols. That would take a while, long that we would likely already have a vaccine by then. But we don't have such anti-viral drugs w/ which to control the virus. In fact...
we just discovered that hydroxychloroquine, which people recently touted as supposed proven to work, may not work at all. Therefore, there is only one ethical way to deal with COVID19 today... avoid it as best as possible. zjujournals.com/med/EN/10.3785…
Means social distancing, cleaning, masks of some kind in public whenever possible (save best masks for healthcare workers), and generally trying not to be burden on healthcare system while it deals with all the infected people. Even if/when we get it under control, we can't...
just flood into the streets, bars, & offices or we'll respark the pandemic. We need to wait until vaccines come along. People say that distancing is killing the economy. It's doesn't have to. Society can cut checks to everyone who doesn't have the income to hold out.
If you collect a steady paycheck & normally would see a barber once a month who you now worry is suffering, then you can cut your own hair but can still send a check to your barber. You can do the same with your favorite restaurant. Deny yourself their services, but don't...
...deny them your financial support. Pretend they are like your employee & you are keeping them on payroll. If your own paycheck has been cut as a result of covid distancing, then you obviously can't support others in the same way, which is why the government...
...has to provide cheap loans/grants to businesses to avoid layoffs & unemployment benefits to everyone else. There's enough food for everyone even if money system we use to spread that food around has been disrupted. It's not actually necessary for anyone to be evicted...
...b/c of Covid. Gov't can provide funding to landlords to offset missed rent. If anyone loses their homes, it's a failure of our gov't to provide right support to right points in economy. The solution is absolutely not to expose people to covid to "just get it over with"...
or hoping you can control dose to make keep infection mild. So please don't fuel this idea. Don't try anything like it at home. Instead, settle in for some extended seclusion. Wait for a vaccine. Catch up on reading. If you worry vaccines won't be affordable, then consider...
learning about how healthcare works & why vaccines absolutely will be affordable everywhere in the world. I wrote a book on drug affordability that will open your eyes to how the American HC system works. Just need one afternoon. thegreatamericandrugdeal.com
If you have kids, then you clearly have no time for anything, but as a science lesson, maybe use my analogy to explain to them how vaccines work. We need everyone to learn about vaccines and appreciate them. Because when we finally have them, we need everyone to take them...
to generate herd immunity. I wrote a piece explaining why a covid vaccine is possible (despite our not having vaccines to other human coronaviruses that cause common colds) and that we can still screw it up if we don't learn from our mistakes with flu. city-journal.org/covid-19-our-a…
