COVID-19 Vaccination based on Common Cold Virus

Written by Roger Faulkner; feel free to distribute any way you want.

There are many practically harmless strains of coronavirus that have been co-evolving with humans for millions of years. Rhinovirus strains and coronavirus strains are well known as causative agents for the common cold.

Perhaps the prevalence of the common cold among children is one reason they are not in most cases seeing the worst symptoms of this terrible coronavirus, covid19.

Perhaps a recent infection with one of these common cold coronavirus strains is the reason that three-quarters of people have minor or no symptoms at all when they get COVID-19.

The very first vaccine for any disease was a live virus strain called cowpox. Cowpox infections were found to be protective against smallpox. Mothers would gather their children together so they would all get cowpox.

Edward Jenner developed a smallpox vaccine based on simply infecting patients with cowpox. This was in effect implementing a folk remedy that had been known for years. The first immunization against smallpox was a live cowpox virus that was administered via scratches on the skin. Perhaps a similar approach would be useful in the current pandemic?

I am not enough of an expert in this area to know whether researchers are pursuing this. However, I am able to see the financial incentives and a pre-existing coronavirus that causes a common cold would not be patentable. Nor is it an exciting new technology. Therefore I am suspicious that this angle for the creation of a vaccine for COVID-19 is not being followed up.

There still remains a subculture of moms who carry out the old ways of immunizing their children by letting them get chickenpox for example. This sort of approach could work in a third-world country with poor medical infrastructure. It appears to me to be the only way that a wide-scale inoculation could potentially be carried out in places like that.

Also, such a live virus approach based on well-characterized cold virus is the only feasible way to vaccinate in time to stop this pandemic.

This method does work. Unlike any other vaccination method, it could be rolled out very rapidly, even in regions like Africa where there is very limited ability to deliver traditional vaccines to the population.

There is a way forward on this research which could be quite rapid if it was prioritized. Although most children do not get COVID-19 in a serious way, I am sure that there are some exceptions to that. Testing for signs of previous coronavirus infections between those few children who get severe symptoms and a random population of other children who were exposed to covid19 but didn’t get very sick should allow us to figure out which strains of common cold coronavirus are protective.

If we had well-characterized samples of common cold coronavirus that are at least somewhat protective against COVID-19 it would be easy to make it into an vaccine as well as distributing it so that it can be intentionally spread in rural villages by having a community gathering in which the relevant cold virus is spread through social contacts with an infected person. Or one could even have nasal swabs prepared with q-tips in the nose of someone that carries the virus.

In the British Cold Study (1986 to 1989), people were deliberately infected with strains of rhinovirus or coronavirus, both of which are known causes of the common cold. Since then Carnegie Mellon researchers have followed up with the Common Cold Project. These studies have demonstrated that it is safe to infect volunteers with common cold viruses. great deal has been learned about transmission of colds in this way and it is directly applicable to the covid-19 pandemic.

I do not know how many common cold coronavirus strains may have been studied by the present day. But I think this direction of research is very important at the present moment.

I recommend a crash program to study coronavirus strains which cause common colds to find out which of these strains could be protective against COVID-19. I believe that this approach should be central in the research to find a viable vaccine for COVID-19.

Such a live virus inoculation against COVID-19 is the only feasible method to get a vaccine into circulation soon enough to head off a worldwide pandemic. That is why I have chosen to publish this without all of the references that I would have preferred to have found.

I recently learned another possible reason that children are not getting covid19 as much as adults. Apparently children also have fewer receptors on their lung lining cells which basically pull the virus into the cell. However, this cannot explain that three-quarters of infected adults have no significant symptoms.

It seems to me that a careful study of families that have been infected with the virus might allow researchers to figure out whether the children having past colds protects the mother as well.