For all our sakes, I wish you the best of luck with this idea. I'm sorry I don't know how to help you but your idea sounds promising and it's super invigorating to see high agency people try to implement their solutions to our problems! :)
Ask HN: How to get Bill Gates's attention?
11–20 of 89 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to get Bill Gates's attention?
#12Post your solution on or blog or github with a permissive license. If your solutions is worth anything Bill Gates will come to you.
Re: Ask HN: How to get Bill Gates's attention?
#13First get this validated by a medical authority. Find the best one you can.
Next, send your idea and medical validation to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. You're not contacting Bill, you're contacting his foundation. Their doctors will look at your idea and can present it to Bill on the next scheduled call.
Re: Ask HN: How to get Bill Gates's attention?
#14Summary of the idea from the link in the sibling comment, partially in the words of the author (edited by me): [There might be] natural strains of SARS-CoV-2 in the world that have mutated to be non-pathogenic (asymptomatic), but are still infective and will provide immunity to the more pathogenic (deadly) strains. [If there are and] we can find one of these non-pathogenic viral strains out in the wild we could [use…
I would add that the hypothesis can be checked very quickly and cheaply by genomic sequencing. I can afford the cost of all the sequencing, what I need is access to a large number of samples from people infected with mild cases of COVID-19. My best estimate is you would need to look at north of 5000 samples to find a strain with the right sort of gene deletion.
What about reaching out to the mods of https://Reddit.com/r/Covid19Positive ?
Re: Ask HN: How to get Bill Gates's attention?
#15Presumably you are asking for
- Website where people who fit criteria can register
- some form of triage (symptoms checking, contact tracing)
- Then collection. Presumably people will need to supply mucus samples, and have those samples collected safely. This sounds difficult and seems like the expensive and hard to scale part. But I can imagine a fleet of drivers with some training being able to collect and store samples in "proper" equipment. This is well out of my expertise.
- testing / sequencing (lab based). This you seem confident on.
Is this a good idea - I don't know. Is it possible - yes it seems quite doable. Does it need billg? I doubt it. Plenty of people have cash and now have motivation.
Good luck.
Re: Ask HN: How to get Bill Gates's attention?
#16If anyone wants to know what this possible solution is I have written it up here in non-technical language [0]. 0. https://www.tillett.info/2020/04/05/a-solution-to-covid-19/ Edit. HN seems to have put me on the “posting too fast” treadmill so I will have to edit this post. While effectively the same as a vaccine, it is quite different. Any such attenuated strain identified can be used outside of the regulatory syste…
It is a good idea, but just like the other dozens of possible vaccines it still needs to go through all trial phases, so it's not quicker than the other vaccines which could 'potentially be deployed today' (RNA etc)
Re: Ask HN: How to get Bill Gates's attention?
#17While possible, the notion that asymptomatic[†] cases are due to a separate less-pathogenic strain is both indeed a possibility researchers are thinking about, and yet also not (a priori) the only or perhaps most probable explanation for the wide variance in clinical outcomes we see. Other important, perhaps dominant, factors include heterogeneity in people's immune responses to virus--common in other conditions--and (possibly) a dose-dependence (e.g. if you are exposed to a high viral load e.g. by intense or prolonged exposure, some reports (but far too few for definiteness yet) are that clinical outcomes may be poorer). Though there are different COVID strains in circulation (see the amazing data tracking of https://nextstrain.org/ncov), with regards to the proposed hypothesis: there is no evidence that these strains show any difference in virulence (see e.g. the perspective of Francois Balloux at UCL: https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/12395362423558225...).
Many groups are attempting to scale up environmental genomic testing for COVID (see again the nextstrain site).
[†] Note that currently, researchers are rather vigorously debating the true proportion of asymptomatic cases (or distinguishing them from pre-symptomatic cases)--we need more widespread e.g. antibody-based testing to answer this more confidently than we can by indirectly fitting coarse time-series to simplified models.
Re: Ask HN: How to get Bill Gates's attention?
#18If anyone wants to know what this possible solution is I have written it up here in non-technical language [0]. 0. https://www.tillett.info/2020/04/05/a-solution-to-covid-19/ Edit. HN seems to have put me on the “posting too fast” treadmill so I will have to edit this post. While effectively the same as a vaccine, it is quite different. Any such attenuated strain identified can be used outside of the regulatory syste…
This is well written, and passes the "not a crank" test that many will surely apply. Mathematicians get inundated with unsolicited false proofs of famous theorems, and the cranks always give themselves away by various "poker tells" that they are too delusional to control. This is not that; it is a serious proposal, and it escapes being wrongly classified as otherwise.
I am reminded of a famous computer scientist I know, who dropped everything for years because he had an idea about the CD4-CD8 ratio in Aids patients. Aids patients have fewer CD4 cells. Perhaps the body was only sensing the total, and could be triggered to make replacements for the lost CD4 cells if one medically removed CD8 cells. Remind anyone of rebalancing a portfolio during a market crash? I can find no trace of this effort online, so it's not my place to name the researcher. Science does a poor job of recording its failures.
In any case, it didn't work; medicine is very hard. Be prepared for this idea to be wrong, too, despite best intentions.
Re: Ask HN: How to get Bill Gates's attention?
#19So I'm no expert in medical sciences, but have some basic knowledge. Here's what I think: You're basically proposing a form of vaccination. Essentially everyone knows that a vaccine would be the way out of this mess. There's loads of research on Vaccines for Covid-19 right now. Your idea isn't exceptionally surprising, as you write yourself it's close to how some of the early vaccines worked. I am reasonably convince…
> Given that you want to give it to potentially almost everyone on the planet, you want to be really sure.
This is why I have a hard time with the current crisis. We are in what is now universally called a "global health crisis".
Measures are being taken to help prevent the virus that are incredibly costly for the economy, which will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs, and that will indirectly kill thousands of people.
Yet when it comes to vaccines and treatment tests, we use the usual approach, tests on a very very small number of patients, regulator validation that takes months to process, x phase trials where each phase needs to be tested x times. All these are very fine in a normal situation and help prevent mistakes, but extraordinary times require extraordinary measures.
You don't need to be "really sure" that your vaccine is good, you just need it to be better than the status quo. If we can identify one strain that is indeed less deadly than the average of the virus, it's good enough. You sure are going to kill people, but in a crisis mode, if that allows you to save more, it should be a tradeoff we are willing to make.
Re: Ask HN: How to get Bill Gates's attention?
#20If anyone wants to know what this possible solution is I have written it up here in non-technical language [0]. 0. https://www.tillett.info/2020/04/05/a-solution-to-covid-19/ Edit. HN seems to have put me on the “posting too fast” treadmill so I will have to edit this post. While effectively the same as a vaccine, it is quite different. Any such attenuated strain identified can be used outside of the regulatory syste…
Here is the post for those who don’t want to follow the link. Like nearly everyone on the planet I am worried about COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) appears to be killing between 1% to 3.5% of the people it infects and has a R0 (i.e. how many new people each person infected goes onto infect) of between 2.5 to 3.9. Left to run wild, the virus will likely kill tens of millions of people worldwide.…
> The major risk is the virus we think is safe is not 100% safe.
IANAD, but IMHO you cannot just sequence the virus in asymptomatic people - you have to sequence a randomized, sizable % of the whole positive population, including mild or severe cases, and the dead too. Only then you'll be able to "paint a picture" of the different strains' effects on humans and slap some confidence data to each identified strain. Your idea definitely looks promising though.