Why Do Children Only Get Minor Cases of COVID-19?
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 the reason they are not seeing the worst symptoms of this terrible coronavirus, 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. This same sort of folk remedy is still used by mothers in America… so that all their children would get chickenpox at the same time.
Louis Pasteur was in effect implementing a folk remedy that had been known for years. The first immunization against smallpox was a live cowpox virus that became the first injectable vaccine. 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. Therefore I am suspicious that this angle for the creation of a vaccine for covid19 has not been followed up.
There still remains a subculture of moms who carry out the old ways, inoculating their children by letting them get chickenpox for example.
This method, while not condoned by the medical establishment does work. I’m not suggesting this would be the main way to vaccinate people in the west, but 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 adopted. Although most children do not get covid19 in a dangerous 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 injectable vaccine as well as distributing it so that it can be distributed in rural villages but I having a community gathering in which the virus is distributed. Or one could even have nasal swabs prepared with q-tips in the nose of someone that carries the virus.
There was a research study in the UK where people are deliberately infected with strains of rhinovirus, one of the causes of the common cold. The British cold study occurred between 1986 and 1989 cover and one of the strains that were studied was a coronavirus. Since then, Carnegie Mellon researchers have followed up.
At present I do not know what additional coronavirus strains may have been studied by the present day. But I think this direction of research is very fruitful at the present moment.
I recommend a crash program to study coronavirus strains which cause common colds to find out which if any of these strains could be protective against covid19. I believe that this approach should be central in the research to find a viable vaccine for covid19.
Such a live virus inoculation against covid19 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.
I am including a few links below to follow up on this post. Feel free to distribute this as you see fit.
I have pitched the concept of an open-source ventilator project in this document: https://docdro.id/ud9yvmW
Dr. Benjamin Davido on Children & COVID-19: http://bit.ly/c19french
Epidemic Dynamic: http://bit.ly/ronspahr
Informative Podcast: http://bit.ly/c19podcast
