The past may hold the answer to getting America back to work: Understand what the term, Variolation means

With a vaccine at least a year away, the past may hold the answer to getting the world back in order. Variolation is a six-hundred-year-old predecessor to the smallpox vaccination. It was also an essential part of creating the United States of America. It may be time to visit it once again.

Variolation worked by introducing a minute dose of the smallpox virus into the human body to trigger a mild infection that stimulates the immune system. Unfortunately, some people reacted strongly even to a small dose, and about 2% of people died. The variolation mortality rate, though, was still better than having smallpox running rampant through a community. With variolation, smallpox’s mortality ranged from 35% in Europeans to 90% in Native Americans.

Variolation also failed to control contagion. Because variolated people genuinely had smallpox, they were contagious. However, if a substantial subset of the population was variolated, that helped resolve the infection problem.

Unlike variolations, which mildly infect people to trigger an immune response, vaccinations trick the body into believing it’s been infected, which also creates an immune response. It is, of course, better to fake-out the immune system than to infect people with a disease, no matter how light the viral load. For now, though, we don't have that fake-out vaccination for the Wuhan virus.

Robin Hanson, a scientific polymath, has argued for some time that, with an approved vaccination far in the future, the best short term approach to dealing with the Wuhan virus is variolation. The issue, says Hanson, is viral load:

[E]xtreme “lockdowns”, which isolate most everyone at home, not only limit freedoms and strangle the economy, they also greatly increase death rates. This is because infections at home via close contacts tend to come with higher initial virus doses,

Notice this -— infections at home via close contacts tend to come with higher initial virus doses, in contrast to the smaller doses you might get from, say, a public door handle. As soon as your body notices an infection, it immediately tries to grow a response, while the virus tries to grow itself. From then on, it is a race to see which can grow biggest fastest. And the virus gets a big advantage in this race if its initial dose of infecting virus is larger.

Just as replacing accidental smallpox infections with deliberate low dose infections cut smallpox deaths by a factor of 10 to 30, a factor of 3-30 is plausible for Covid19 death rate cuts due to replacing accidental Covid19 infections with deliberate small dose infections.

Variolation has the virtue of being an honored American tradition.

In 1738, Charleston had a major smallpox outbreak. Eventually, there was a small effort at variolation, but it hadn’t gotten off the ground when the epidemic subsided. Twenty-two years later, in 1760, when smallpox appeared again, the town’s doctors were more open to variolation. Within 2 1/2 weeks, they’d variolated 6,000 of the town’s 8,000 residents, black and white alike.

An interesting historical footnote is that, when doctors were called to white patients, they sweated the patients – that is, they basically parboiled the patients, killing them. Blacks, ignored by the medical establishment, did better, especially if they were exposed to sunshine. Sunshine’s benefits appeared again with the Spanish Influence in 1918, making ludicrous today’s mandate that Americans must be trapped indoors.

Free blankets for Democrats. Works for me.

Someone explain to me how putting still infectious recovering patients in retirement homes is different than when the British gave smallpox contaminated blankets to the Indians?

Cuomo knew there were thousands of empty beds on board the USNS Comfort and in multiple field hospitals, yet he deliberately and maliciously set the stage to infect people in the very highest risk categories.

To be fair, he did include shipments of body bags with each infectious patient inflicted on the nursing homes.

What a guy!

Someone explain to me why this isn’t mass murder under color of law?

A while back, I read a pioneer memoir, The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie. In the 1820s, Pattie and his father and some friends decided to go through the southwest into California, then all part of Mexico. The Mexican authorities were suspicious of Americans traveling there without passport, and they found themselves in prison a number of times. When they reached California, there was a smallpox epidemic, and Pattie got on the good side of the authorities by claiming he could inoculate against the disease. He claims to have traveled from mission to mission in California, inoculating the people, with good success. He didn't exactly explain how he did it, so I wonder if this is the method he used.

“Notice this -— infections at home via close contacts tend to come with higher initial virus doses, in contrast to the smaller doses you might get from, say, a public door handle.”

I think it is possible that many people are getting their small doses and mild infections, from which they develop antibodies to the Wuhan Virus, from the random “public” infectious encounters, as opposed to the more than once repeated contact from someone who is infected that they have repeated close contact with - providing a larger viral load and a more severe infection.

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