Ending respiratory infections
blog.interceptfund.com202 points by EthanFantl 2 days ago
202 points by EthanFantl 2 days ago
My girlfriend died from human metapneumovirus at 30 years young. She had a weakened immune system from lymphangiomatosis, so something like metapneumovirus, which is a mild illness for most people, was a death sentence for her. I hope this fund is successful so nobody else ever has to go through what she did.
This is the kind of thing people miss when they say "it's just a cold". I really hope this work goes somewhere.
Sorry for your loss.
Thank you. It's crazy how quickly life can change.
She filled out a healthcare directive when she was 24. Either she never gave it to her clinic or it didn't get transferred with her other files or something when she started going to a different hospital system. Anyway, the hospital she was in didn't have it. She was hospitalized for like 5 days before she passed. I found that healthcare directive that morning, just a few hours before she died. It was stuffed in the back of a drawer. I was tearing up my apartment trying to find it. And when I found it I saw she had written on there
Please celebrate my life, mourn for me, but know I am in a better place. God has a plan for me, and He has a plan for all of you.
So sorry to hear that. I know neither you nor her, but no one ought to go through that. I hope you are doing well. Best wishes
My wife has LAM. Was your girlfriend on medication hence the weakened immune system?
She frequently took cycles of rapamycin, steroids, and some other drugs I don't recall the names of. At one time she was taking thalidomide. I don't recall what medications she was on at the time she got sick. Most of the cysts were in her lungs so her lung capacity on a good day was halved. She had a stroke as a teen during what I think was a lung biopsy, before they had figured out that she had lymphangiomatosis, so she had medical issues from that as well.
(commented this on the other post which gained no traction at all already:) It's good to see more money flowing towards this totally underfunded area. However I think it's an odd choice of them to focus on filtration, UV-inactivation and other things and at least from the wording on the website not on ventilation, which they sort of assume as given. They also seem to be way very focused on product development rather than awareness, public policy and lobbying. This is a typical techno-fix approach for an area where existing technologies already exist and are just held back by all types of different market failures (hard to estabilish causality, low salience, needs to be done at large scale, concentrated costs but dispersed benefits, lack of information etc.). In some way it's like funding Direct Air Capture instead of Solar & Wind but in a fictional world where Solar and Wind are already as cheap as today but have a buildout like 20 years ago.
I've written about it in more detail here: https://www.indoorco2map.com/blog.html?post=interceptFund
It's sad we're resorting to philanthropy to solve problems like this. $500M is chump change.
NASA spent something like $300B in today's money on the Apollo program, and Artemis has exceeded $90B already.
I'm much more keen on never getting sick than prepping for Mars.
The Iran war is going to cost us at least $200 billion dollars and you’re over here complaining about NASA spending?
just keep reminding yourself who was on those files... in case you forget it over the war
Don't forget but don't hold it too dearly, clearly US society as a whole doesn't give a f*ck about pedophiles, thats the message I see consistently now. Still not comprehending how can any sane half-decent parent think and act like that (or just any decent human for that matter), but here we are and these are facts.
Files? You mean Epstein? You have the wrong target there and you are playing into your enemy’s game.
Add to that more than $300 billion that the US has given to Israel as "aid". And as a thanks, a lost war with Iran with global economic implications.
Iran? An immigrant might get free healthcare, or a trans person might not have a horrible day today. Have you ever considered that?
It's strange how much we've normalized everyone being sick for weeks every year, even though the total cost is enormous
And you're talking about the spending of a single country, but the success of a plan like this improves the lives of everyone globally. So if drugs were developed by a world-wide fund where every country chips in a percentage of their GDP or whatever, then it would be even more affordable.
It’s 500m spend without guaranteed success.
Yeah, so was building moon rockets.
I don't think anyone (not insane) actually doubted we could reach the moon, they were just unsure how much money it'd take per launch, and if it'd ever be worth it. Because we had already reached orbit, "add more fuel" is essentially a guaranteed success, if infinite money is allowed - at worst you do it in multiple launches and join up the parts in space. 2, 10, 1000, it'll eventually succeed, there's no reason to believe it wouldn't.
Reaching another star? Definitely more expensive, but entirely feasible if we all got our shit together and decided it was going to happen.
Medical stuff though? Humans are complicated, and there are practically no guaranteed routes, regardless of money (currently).
Yet the chance of saving human lives en masse and permanently advancing knowledge of our own bodies should be more important than ticking a checkbox of walking on the moon and then shelving whole thing for good (that comes from person who loves astronomy etc but there are simply way more important matters in society).
We iteratively succeeded against AIDS ffs, that looked like impossible mission in 80s and 90s, we just threw more science and research on the problem. Your arguments are not that good
That's not a reason. That's an anecdote, a post selected and cherry picked example. Is this truly how you'd allocate resources?
A more correct way to use reason is to look at all possible things that have been proposed that cost $500m, and see how those turn out in general. Then possibly weight using expert knowledge about this particular problem and the possible benefits. Then consider what the opportunity cost is, i.e., what you give up by spending $500m here instead of something else.
Trite armchair rebuttals are not convincing.
[flagged]
Other people getting assistance too don't take away anything from your friend at all. If you want to be angry, be angry about your government spending trillions for the military and billionaires, not about the weakest parts of society.
It doesn't "take away", but if your employer paid you $x and you were struggling, and then they gave the same $x or more to people hanging out in the parking lot, you would probably see that as a personal insult.
That's a bit disingenuous, though; for that analogy to work, it would be the employer paying you, with a tenure of 40 years, the same shit salary as the new hire. And I get how frustrating that may feel, but it's still not the new hire's fault, but your boss's.
Bottom line, both of you are getting a shit salary while the C-Suite and their investor friends rake in a multiple of your annual salary every month.
That's not a good analogy because you had to work and contribute to get your SS, while the new illegal has money spent on him for basically breaking the law and sneaking into the country over overstaying his visa.
Social Security is the number 1 line item accounting for over 22% of the federal budget.
For now. Expect that to be overtaken by debt servicing in the not too distant future.
What makes you think they will succeed?
Yep. I don't see 500 million being even close to enough to develop broad-spectrum preventatives that would be easy enough and safe enough to administer, to get over 67% of the population to take them.
> I'm much more keen on never getting sick than prepping for Mars.
Never getting sick is an enabler to reaching the goal. And the goal is..?
There are already people dying of malnutrition, preventable disease, etc. in the third world. Half a billion dollars could do a lot of good there, instead of going towards a pipe dream to make sure people never have to miss work for the flu again.
Everything should be voluntary philantrhopy! It seems like the ideal state if people are willing to do the pro-social thing by their own volition.
Is it better if your child does their homework because they freely choose to, or is it better that they do it because you will beat them with a belt?
I'm sure if we just cut taxes a little more, our modern-day robber barons will choose to use their money to fix things on their own instead of building doomsday bunkers and buying superyachts.
it will start to trickle down any moment now!
It is trickling down, always has been! The emperor IS wearing beautiful clothes, also!
Do you understand what ideal means? Would you rather have the government do something then people do it?
The idea used to be that they were the same.
In practice, the government only represents the most sociopathic people.
Every day that passes this seems to become more true. I don't believe this must be true. I don't believe it was always true.. but gosh have we taken some turns..
The government is about forcing people to do things they dont want to. If something isnt against peoples wishes, you dont need the government to do it.
But people are not voluntarily philanthropists.
There's a reason we had to introduce work regulations so you don't have children working 13 hours shifts in coal mines.
It's way better if my children study by themselves, but if left to their own devises they'll just watch cartoons all day.
(Not advocating for belting kids, just saying there's a gap between utopia and reality)
> There's a reason we had to introduce work regulations so you don't have children working 13 hours shifts in coal mines.
Coincidentally, the regulations appeared when it was no longer profitable to employ children. If you don't believe that, just imagine what jobs kids could do in your workplace. I can't think of any.
Coal mining today is done with industrial machines.
But philanthropy does exist. The question is if that is better than tax funding.
It is interesting how reactionary people are to the topic.
> So, to get closer to elimination, we also need a way to reduce the virions circulating in high density environments. During COVID the world experimented with various interventions like social distancing and personal protective equipment. But to reduce transmission durably for a large number of common respiratory viruses that are perennially circulating, we need solutions that are convenient and minimally disruptive.
We think the most promising category of products that accomplish these goals are those that remove pathogens from the air, particularly in high-density environments like offices, schools, and public transit. We’ll call these air cleaning technologies (ACTs) like air filtration and far-UVC antimicrobial light.
Sounds like a pretty big challenge to me... Ok, during Covid I read that airplane-style air conditioning with nozzles above each seat and used air pumped out at ground level was pretty good in making sure "your" air didn't get mixed up with your neighbor's (masks were still mandatory however on the few flights I took during that period). But how are you going to do the same in a packed subway train in, let's say, Tokyo or New York, at rush hour? That air conditioning unit would probably have to be as heavy as the train itself, and to the passengers it would feel like a hairdryer (on cold setting) blasting at them permanently from above...
People can wear masks in confined spaces. It doesn't preclude the benefits of filtering the air and using Far UVC. Defense in depth. But also there are lots of spaces where filtration and UVC can really work wonders.
> We surveyed attendees ahead of the symposium. One of our questions was: if this doesn’t happen in the next ~10 years, what will the primary reason be? The number one reason cited was lack of funding, followed by technical feasibility. Why hasn’t this field attracted sufficient funding, especially given the enormous societal burden?
Isn't a projected problem with technical feasibility an explanation for lack of funding?
Not really. They're trying to split up potential causes of failure between:
1. "Funding" meaning: We knew what we had to do but didn't have enough money to do it; if we had, this path would have worked (though why it says "TAM" here I don't quite get);
2. "Technical" meaning: We knew what we wanted to do but couldn't quite make it work; if we had, this path would have worked
3. "Uptake"/"Regulatory" (perhaps not the most natural pairing, though I see why they're together) meaning "We couldn't get people to actually do it"/"The authorities wouldn't let us do it"; if we had, this path would have worked
But that is missing a much different type of failure:
4. "Strategy" meaning "This path does not actually lead to our goal"
It's easy to see why in marketing material they'd leave out that last one. They want to build confidence! But for a moonshot like this, especially a biological one, it's kind of silly to think that this is definitely the best way to achieve this goal. I am, personally, quite skeptical; this reads like a mashup of SV and germophobes (with apologies to, well, both of those groups). I hope it works! And I won't stand in its way. But I won't be betting my own money on it. Probably we will learn something interesting no matter what.
More generally, this is a distinction that a lot of people miss (often intentionally, if PR/marketing is involved): strategy and tactics are distinct and they can succeed or fail independently. The best execution (tactics) here will not help if the plan (strategy) is flawed. And there are numerous other examples from research, business, and of course everyone's favorite hobby subject, war, of what happens when your tactics are good but your strategy isn't, or vice versa, or any of the other combinations. And, of course, making decisions about when to pivot (switch strategies) and all those other fun topics.
> Healthy people spend roughly 15-25 days each year—about 5% of their lives—sick with respiratory infections like the common cold and influenza
This seems completely unbelievable to me. Totally outside of my personal, professional, and family experience.
No kids eh?
My oldest starting preschool was one of the worst times in my life. We were sick from august to december, then january to may. Dreadful.
It got better. My youngest is 3 now and is ahead of where my oldest was due to having 2 older siblings importing illnesses for several years, and this year we finally were mostly not sick all school year. Which is to say, we were probably closer to the 15 days "materially sick" mark. I say materially sick to mean, definitely sick, though perhaps not taken out of school (due to not technically being outside of the health exclusion policy, and sometimes I only realize they were "materially" sick after they got home instead of just "passably sick given kids will basically have a lingering cough from august to may).
For me personally, I never was so sick in my life as when my children were between starting nursery school and 3. It was not just respiratory diseases: It was also the time in my life I and my wife had frequent digestive infections. Ohh my...How many times I could not move for 2 days. It felt like I was 80 years old, mixed with the hardest symptoms of food poisoning.
I got sick so often it limited a lot my general life: I stopped practicing sports regularly and started being very careful with sleep(sleep deprivation likely increased the chance of infection), because I knew if I did not lead a perfectly balanced lifestyle I would get sick. I am quite upset I stopped running 15km per week, even with snow. I never fully went back to it, due to fear of getting sick, and having to take care of toddlers while being feverish or nauseated.
In those years I think I was not disease free more than 3 months at a time. In a year where many people decide to not have children, it does not help the cause of having children seeing other parents suffer so much, in those early years. I have non parent friends that get sick after meeting us, resenting meeting us and asking if we are sick, because they spent all the night in the bathroom or with fever. Fortunately it feels we are already immune because we are not sick very often anymore.
> I never fully went back to it, due to fear of getting sick
Does running long distance increase the chance of getting sick?
Running requires resting for me, and I often do not have time to rest longer with the kids. Meals still need to be prepared, and kids need to be minded. Kids have a strict time to go to kinder garten so I still need to get up at 7.00 or 7.30AM. I don't have grandparents around, just me and my wife.
So if I am exhausted of a run and cannot rest or sleep, it is almost sure I get sick soon after. Just my experience.
This happened to us too, until I heard the podcast about Vitamin D. Nipped that in the bud almost immediately.
Yeah I took vitamin D all through my kids' nursery years, every morning, had strong belief in it.
I still was sick all the time. That combination of not enough sleep (kids crying in the night etc.), work stress and insane amount of viruses from nursery is killer.
Not enough info, maybe bad brand or dosage. Maybe you have other immune issues.
Not well known but there are people who simply can not absorb D thru the gut. A high school friend is one. Shouldn’t discourage the 90%+ who can benefit because of exceptions.
Alternatively, I might have been even more sick if I didn't take vitamin D!
This is Linus Pauling all over again.
I don't care what was "disproven" or if it's a placebo.
I raised vitamin D intake in winter, I take betaglucans and if I feel like I am starting to get under the weather I take 2-3g of vitamin C per day.
Since we started that, no colds or flus for me or my wife and we have a kindergarten kid.
I heard about vitamin D during covid, and that and hand sanitizer are the only 2 things we still do. I haven't been sick for a few years. Before covid (and vitamin D supplements), it was at least 25 days sick every year, if not more.
What's that? Any particular dosage?
Security now, but there’s more recent info today. Today I take 5k D3, K2 Mk7, and a multivitamin several times a week, not every day. More in winter.
Result: not been sick more than a day or two for fifteen years. And rarely, once or twice a winter.
One exception, during covid I had it and it lasted five full days at medium intensity, then went away permanently.
This is not a “placebo effect” at all, was like turning on a light switch, immediate results. During the winter I heard about it, I’d been sick for almost three weeks straight, couldn’t shake it. Naysayers look silly in my opinion, or are perhaps an exception I mentioned above.
Kids don't just get sick, they seem to turn the whole house into a slow-motion relay race of viruses
This sounds roughly normal for what I came to expect back when I worked in an office with many people who had school-age kids. I had a colleague who wryly referred to his kids as "my little plague carriers".
When I stopped working in an office, I almost completely stopped getting sick.
+1 for office work as disease source. Plus taking public transport (mostly underground trains). Today I avoid the subway almost completely, taking my bike almost everywhere, to avoid getting sick during winter. (No kids though)
Unbelievable in which direction?
I've had years in which most people in my immediate surroundings were sick for weeks or months (likely exacerbated by mold, school, and travel). Also years in which I never really got sick at all.
Getting sick that often is pretty debilitating.
This feels about right to me. Living with kids and commuting via public transport (in a country where face masks are not common) might break 5%.
Are you reading “sick” as so ill that you can’t carry out your normal routine? I think they mean any symptoms.
> I think they mean any symptoms.
I think so, too. The referenced article (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...) says:
“Every year, in the USA, about 25 million people visit their family doctors with uncomplicated upper respiratory infections, and the common cold syndrome results in about 20 million days of absence from work and 22 million days of absence from school.”
That makes 44 million days of absence on a population of 340 million, or about one day for every 7½ citizens.
Even assuming healthy people are as susceptible to that as the general population and assuming 50% of those that get ill will work, anyways, out of financial necessity, that still is a far cry from “Healthy people spend roughly 15-25 days each year […] sick”
That paper also has a graph showing Mean annual incidence of respiratory illnesses by age group. Eyeballing it (ignoring size differences between age groups) I get at an average of about 3 infections. If each takes a week, that gets you to those 15-25 days.
Being sick ~20 days per year was the norm for me before remote work (and using N95 masks after it ended). Some people are lucky, others are not. (well, "luck" actually encompasses many factors such as population density, presence/lack of children, mandatory office presence, proper infection countermeasures in public places (air filtering, aeration), and I assume sufficient sleep or not (the only time I did not get sick as often without masking was when I managed to sleep 8 hours a day for a few months))
Yea, Remote Work was a game changer for me. I used to get sick at about that rate, too when I worked in an office building, where I had to touch filthy germy doors all day walking from room to room, and were in constant close proximity to coworkers jammed together on shared desks.
Now that I'm isolated in my sterile home office and might go weeks without seeing someone outside of my family, I basically take no sick days.
I guess it depends a lot on what they count as sick. I definitely don't spend 3 weeks a year in bed, but if you add up all the random sore throats, congestion, coughs that linger for a week and "not really sick but clearly fighting something" days, it may be less crazy than it sounds
For my family of 5 w/ school age children I would say that is a pretty reasonable estimate, maybe even a bit low for us. There are levels of “sick” though and I would say for us most respiratory illnesses are very mild and are a minor annoyance. Where it becomes more menacing is when we have sick kids and sick parents at the same time.
I would love to move to whatever planet you're living on. To me the estimate seems low.
No its correct, having 2 kids and rate of sickness went through the roof, same for my wife.
We also had 10+ covids to indicate how much it changes, mostly imported by kids from creche (we hit the 'right' timing with them and covid waves). What do you expect when they shared pacifiers and put fingers in mouths all the time. Or suddenly sneezing gunk all over my face when holding them.
Before kids, I was usually sick 1x a year for few days, or had 1 proper flu week and that was it, my wife even less. No it didn't visibly improve our immunity, had covid last autumn and it felt almost like for the first time, sans loss of smell and taste.
Healthy lifestyle and food have a huge part. I date teachers a lot, and I've taken several people from constantly sick to almost never sick for 1+ year by just changing food and not going out to bars. I know this sounds like a random flippant comment, but I've done it enough times and consistently enough that I have no doubt personally.
Am I down voted because people think I am just lying for fun, or because the idea that eating right and avoiding tight places packed with people keeping you from getting sick is upsetting?
You're getting downvoted because it's annoying to spout your own success, and EXTREMELY suspect that it's replicable. It's basically spam.
Spam I assume would need to be pushing some product or at least agenda.
A message reminding people that you can improve the resistance to basic colds/flu for a school teacher, tested on several school teachers, should be motivating for someone tired of being sick.
A large volume of today's spam doesn't sell a product at first blush - it just piques interest, just as yours did. Then those ensnared by that, the responses, get the pitch more privately.
You asked why you're getting downvoted. I'm doing you the service of explaining it's because your comment looks spammy and annoying. Take the feedback...
Well I have no pitch, unless "as little processed food as possible and no nightlife" is a sellable ebook.
I am so tremendously excited to see this, I've had quite a few friends become permanently disabled from long covid and even have some lingering symptoms myself from my last infection and so anything to improve access and uptake of air cleaning technologies and new preventatives is amazing.
As someone who still masks (KN95) in all indoor settings where unmasked people are present, I am all for this. Very much looking forward to seeing where it leads.
What is it that motivates you to continue wearing a mask?
I take note of people who are still masking, but I have compassion for their fear so I don't say anything.
In a nutshell, not wanting to risk my entire future due to organ damage from repeated COVID infection (especially my brain of course, since I'm a programmer by trade and my livelihood and everything I've worked towards depends on my sharpness/etc.)... Family member died from a COVID infection. Another family member developed a heart arrhythmia immediately following "asymptomatic" COVID infection. Family friend's mom died from it. Coworker's sister disabled due to it, can no longer work, gets winded just walking to the kitchen. One of my favorite musicians called it quits completely because she went deaf in one ear from it. I could share anecdotes like these all day, it's not like a rare thing but shockingly common that people have serious issues from this.
Most of the time wearing a mask has no ill effect (particularly in stores or whatever), but it does get super old that it's an uphill battle with pretty much everyone everywhere, because for them everything is "back to normal". I don't care if I have to sit there in the restaurant and not eat anything while everyone else eats, but other people find it awkward and make constant comments about it -- or I just don't get invited to stuff too. (As an aside, it's frustrating that restaurants with outdoor patios often aren't much help, because apparently the trend is that outdoor patios have to be completely enclosed in plexiglass thus defeating the purpose of an outdoor patio) ...
It has been a pretty interesting 6 years, noting how people respond to the masking. I think people just think we're ill, pretty often. I've had a few people give a judgemental look, especially in Europe. No one has really said anything out loud, surprisingly.
What's especially surprising is just how inconsiderate people are -- going to work (or just being out in public) while blatantly sick, spreading their illness to others, never wearing a mask because apparently that's too hard or something. Too bad for anyone who's immune-compromised or lives with immune-compromised people, I guess. The pandemic has really opened my eyes to just how selfish people are, and it has been very disappointing to see. It has also highlighted the degree of consideration and thoughtfulness many people enact, which is super awesome to see!
Well, in my case it's because A: I have a gazillion underlying health issues and B: I haven't been "sick" since February of 2020, when I had a diagnosed type-B flu.
You don't just assume they have more fragile health? People I know who mask have had cancer, long covid, lung issues, new babies in the house, ...
The tricky part is that the benefit is invisible. If it works, nothing happens: people just get sick less often. That is a hard thing to sell to building owners and employers unless the evidence and standards are really solid
It seems like implementing HEPA filters in every classrooms has the biggest effect. The kids are spreading disease, infecting their parents, who then infect their coworkers.
Nice to see they mention UV, too. Aerolamp[0] is down to ~$500. If it were $100, it'd be easy to get into offices, too. Heck, if I worked in person, I'd buy a $100 one as an employee.
Noble goal, but tell a bunch of scientists and startups that you've got a grand vision and $500 million in cash to burn, and they're always going to tell you a story about how it could be possible if you give them that money. And your sycophantic AI you use to research and vet will also always tell you there's a chance, if that's what you seem to be wanting.
> Why haven’t we already seen the same kind of transformation with respiratory viruses?
Because it’s a lot easier to control the supply of a material that has to be actively transported into people’s houses for them to use? I struggle to take them seriously when I didn’t see this basic and fundamental difference even mentioned.
Came here to say the same thing. It's simple to clean all the water you consume, cleaning all the air you breathe is impossible unless you want to walk around like Bane. Bizarre that they don't mention this when comparing respiratory infections to waterborne infections.
But you’re not carrying around your own water treatment mechanism either (unless you’re out hiking). It is relatively easy to install air purifiers or UVC lights in offices, schools, grocery stores, etc. The problem is that people don’t care enough about air quality and the ROI isn’t clear. Increasing the ventilation rate in an overstuffed co-working space has cost implications for the operator, but it doesn’t increase revenue.
The point is that if you don't install pipes, there's no water going into the house, and so pipes were created even before water was being treated, and it made an easy single point of control. Air is arriving everywhere from everywhere - there is no existing system that can be monitored and set to improve it without every house updating.
Can it be dangerous to use uv as it can cause mutations in pathogens potentially making them evolve even faster?
I assume the kind of uv used must be fatal, but is there a chance that a tiny percentage makes it?
Sunlight is the biggest UV source and at the scales we’re talking, manmade disinfectants would not register
I was really disappointed that air cleaning didn’t take off after Covid. Super disappointing to see society just collectively decide to not learn any lessons.
Even if there were no mortality or productivity benefits, you’d think cutting down on cold and flu would be sufficient motivation on its own. Especially in schools and other high risk places.
Kudos to these people.
We had twins after having a singleton during covid. We invested in 4 big hepa air filters and placed one in each bedroom. I think it significantly reduced the amount of illnesses we faced in the first year if the twins life. Lesson learned for us.
> Even if there were no mortality or productivity benefits, you’d think cutting down on cold and flu would be sufficient motivation on its own.
You'd think that, but air-cleaning equipment that's not legally required is an avoidable expense. People getting sick, crippled, or even dying from things that aren't legally your fault doesn't appear on a company's balance sheets.
Given that, it's pretty obvious what a business that's out to save every dollar you can get away with will choose to do.
My son is susceptible to these type of infections and has asthma. He missed 17 days of school last year. Even if not fatal these types of infections are miserable and have an impact on those who get them and their caretakers.
It's an announcement that someday something may be accomplished.
This is how anything starts. First you have to get noticed by others who are aligned with your values. That helps you get funding, research support, and a network who you'll need.
Please don't pooh-pooh other people trying to make things happen. It costs you nothing to not post negative comments.
I'd be interested to see more concerted research into contagious/self-replicable vaccines that are self-replicating and spreadable to a wider swath of people. That seems like a step forward in public health prevention for seasonal illnesses that we have well-engineered and safe vaccines for.
I understand the bar for deployment would need to be high to ensure that side effects are even rare compared to typical voluntary vaccinations.
This sounds like a wonderfully deadly bio-weapon platform you're planning there. Maybe introduce some gene filter to target specific population groups..? The possibilities are endless!
Self-replicating vaccines? We already have those. They're called diseases.
I still amazed how so many people don't get this entire planet is one feedback loop system of competing life processes and they think hiding in their dusty houses with artificial cures will keep them away from competition and immune against death.
That's not a very good characterisation. There is competition, but there's also cooperation: the behaviour of an ecosystem is only really dominated by competition in the wake of a catastrophe, as a new status quo is established. Competition is, after all, energetically wasteful: nobody wants to do it if they can honestly signal instead. (Even competing organisms tend to perform a degree of cooperation, if their ancestors co-evolved.)
1) There’s no way the public would buy in to this idea. 2) This seems like a serious violation of medical ethics. 3) If we already gave a well-engineered and safe vaccine, why not take that? Supply chain and immunization itself isn’t a practical choke point: it’s vaccine accuracy for things like flu, and vaccine misinformation for something like measles. But again, take the vaccine or don’t: for most illnesses and most scenarios, you’re only hurting yourself.
Maybe they can send some of this money to the Wuhan Institive of Virology to research respiratory viruses in bats and some to Raph Baric at UNC for vaccine development. What could go wrong?
Hard to tell. They might have equally well found something helpful if it weren't for the incident.
no thanks
If you want to end respiratory infections: eat healthy, exercise, stop smoking, decrease stress, spend time outside in the sun
Are you really under the impression that doing that makes you immune to the flu?
As someone currently with a nasty cold, having to work through it anyhow - please.
> Why haven’t we already seen the same kind of transformation with respiratory viruses?
My favorite conspiracy-adjacent theory is that pharmaceutical companies don’t have any intention to give up the multi-billion dollar market of cold and respiratory infections palliatives. Even if there is no ill intent, there are just no market or capitalistic incentives, because a one-shot solution for these pathogens is not going to create a market as rich as the previous one.
To me this is the perfect representation of why believing the market is a positive force is wrong. If not for external pressure, in this case the market clearly signals that it’s best for us all to keep getting colds.
Not from those companies, to be sure. That's not even a conspiracy-adjacent idea, a decent product manager will point out that a new company would be "counter positioned" to the existing palliative companies - for the palliative companies to compete, they'd have to undercut their own product success. (In most cases, they don't, which is one major way disruption happens).
That has nothing to do with "the market". The market would start more new healthcare companies, and they'd be doing things like this blog post. The issue we have in many parts of the market is regulatory capture - a few companies have convinced government to make regulations that increase the cost of starting a competitor. Healthcare is definitely one of those places!
Sure, a freer market would probably have problems some or even most of those regulations prevent. And at the same time, we've created a problem. I've heard it suggested that government should always shoulder the marginal cost of regulations they create, because that's the only way you avoid a couple of players preventing new entrants.
the premise is wildly disengenious in conflating the pureification of water supplys, and air. a simple set of facts is that humans now represent the largest mass and population of large animals ever to exist. this population inhabits many habitats , both natural and constructed. this population has huge numbers of indivuals who have compromised imune systems. and last, but worst is that humans now constitute a biological niche, and a primary law of biology is the "all niches will be filled"
No idea of whether those people ar competent, or if it's a PR stunt. Good luck to them. I've joked often enough that "a vaccine for common cold" would have changed my life.
Also, I'm:
- happy that they don't claim the breakthrough will come from AI or Blockchain, for once
- a bit surprised that they got founding by both openAi and Anthropic (so of course they'll try to solve a few things with ai and Blockchain, but,who knows.) Aren't those companies loosing vast amount of money at the moment ? What are they doing philanthropy with ? Just borrowing ? Or are investors for their Series XYZ usually ok with the owner using the money to fund pet projects (even if here, the "pet project" is a good idea, and potentially a good customer/ ?
Your post is equalising the utility of blockchain and AI which means you have no idea about the utility of either of them.
My post should have used quotes around "AI and blockchain" (or maybe read "AI and blockain and VR and whatever").
By that I meant "they don't pretend they're going to solve a hard problem by vaguely handwaving at trendy buzzwords".
More seriously speaking, I suspect (and hope) that some form of machine learning / data generation could help in such an effort (AlphaFold is a thing, not a buzzword.)
The blockchain part is much more tongue in check, of course.
[dead]
[dead]
It's important to build on solid foundations, rather than on faulty assumptions. My experience is the standard medical approach to lung problems is basically wrong.
There was a submission ~6 years ago about using ethanol to sanitize people's lungs as a treatment for COVID-19. One of the comments shared a college story about how they were coerced into treating their sniffles with a spoon and vodka: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22745834
In early 2020 I started advocating using the classic herbal treatment for lung problems: apple brandy inhaled from a charred oak keg. The theory is simply that the ethanol is an antiseptic, and the apple and oak flavoring compounds stimulate the lungs to repair themselves.
I found a manufacturer and started selling little 3L kegs. My first customer asked, "can I try it?" I warned that the ethanol burns before you get used to it. I was impressed that he was able to fill his lungs with apple brandy fumes without coughing the first time. After a moment of held breath he darted off. When he came back 1 or 2 minutes later he said, "I'll take one".
He was a big guy. His problem was getting winded between his car and the store. That he could walk for one or two minutes on lungs filled with apple brandy fumes, when he couldn't normally walk without getting winded while breathing normally, was incredible.
2 hours later he called back. The husband of the woman he'd been the driver for that day was ~70 year old husband and coughing himself to death with a case of the COPD. He'd quit smoking ~20 years before, but his lungs never recovered.
Both of these men's lung conditions rapidly improved after they started inhaling apple brandy fumes. After he started huffing on apple brandy 4x/day, the COPD fellow's coughs went away, and his skin went from 'gray' to 'pink'. The other fellow caught the COVID-19 in June or July that year. I heard his lung capacity score was fantastic, the virus was just hitting his kidneys. He survived his hospitalization.
The modern tool that facilitates the inhalation of apple brandy is a nebulizer.
Different story: in 2021/2022 I was emailed by a woman who'd found my youtube video. In 2023 she came out to Arizona to visit, then to stay permanently. She always assumed that her lung problems were related to the asbestos she'd inhaled on 9/11. But since she's started using the apple brandy barrel, she's only had to use her inhaler once in the past 3 years: when she got a lung full of hairspray in the gym's bathroom.
As the submission in the link above indicated at the start of COVID-19, treatment with inhaled ethanol is a reasonable initial treatment for respiratory problems.
You had a guy fill his lungs with ethanol and then drive away as a chauffeur.
While I think it’s a noble idea I think much more could be achieved with much smaller amounts of money. Actually zero. Regulate sugar, introduce a HIGH sugar tax. Introduce higher nicotine and alcohol tax. Introduce stricter environmental controls for poisonous materials and water and air pollution. All these things cost essentially zero to implement, they even bring in money and all of them are credible ways to significantly reduce health problems world wide. But eh, I’m not part of a lobbying organisation, so what do I know.
I like the idea, but I think there will be significant costs associated with it, especially for stricter environmental controls for poisonous materials and water / air pollution, since it'll cost companies to implement and maintain this, regulate it etc.
First we need strong immune system for all. This is a huge endeavour that includes exercise, both aerobic and non, low stress and other interventions.
Drugs and medicine play a small role in resp viral infections.