Just woke up (I am in Australia). I expect some harsh comments as the idea is controversial. To your specific points. a) The post was intended for a lay audien

Just woke up (I am in Australia). I expect some harsh comments as the idea is controversial. To your specific points. a) The post was intended for a lay audience, not other scientists directly. The reason I didn’t write a scientific paper on this is it would sink without a trace as most scientists and doctors are too conservative. It is quite a radical idea and while scientifically sound, it will take mavericks outside of science to see this done. For better or worse it will take the efforts of someone like on of the tech billionaires to push this forward. b) If I had to choose one aspect that gets most commonly confused by people who read the idea it would be the reason for searching only mild/asymptomatic cases. This is purely an efficiency issue. In an ideal world we would sequence the strains in all cases, look to see if we can find mutants with deletions, and then see what was the clinical outcome of those infected with that strain. If we find that all cases of a particular mutant are mild/asymptomatic then we would have our candidate. Because we live in a constrained world where it is not possible to sequence all cases, where should we first look? Since we are looking for a mutant that only causes mild/asymptomatic cases we can exclude patients with serious symptoms as a first pass. Once we find a candidate strain that has the right sort of mutation we can then sequence all cases in the local area, both serious and mild to get the full clinical picture. This will make the search much more efficient. c) I am recommending that we put b) into action and get on with specifically looking for an attenuated (only causes mild disease) strain ASAP. If we find one then we can discuss what to do next, but the first step is to get started. The good news is this can be done quickly and relatively cheaply provide we have the will and the support of someone with the clout to make it happen. It won’t be easy, but it can be done.