How to get Bill Gates's attention?

If 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 system. This is the real key to the idea.

Edit 2. I am not a crank - well at least I don’t think I am. I have a PhD in microbiology and I have been a professor in microbiology and virology. I now work in the biotech industry. Have a look at the about me section of my blog to check into my background if you care about these things.

First 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.

I sent this to someone at the Bill & Melinda foundation. If they contact you let us all know.

I read somewhere that Bill Gates is very active on social media e.g. Reddit and Twitter. Here is one of the AMAs he did on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/im_bill_gates_...

A recent AMA related to covid-19. There are references to his team and adviser: https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fksnbf/im_bill...

His Reddit handle is: https://www.reddit.com/user/thisisbillgates His Twitter handle is: https://twitter.com/BillGates His blog is: http://www.gatesletter.com

If you search, you will also easily find his email address online. He has multiple email addresses as per online searches.

HTH

Chinese researchers on findings of a less deadly strain, preprint March 10:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.10.20033944v...

We found, in our 788 confirmed COVID-19 patients, the decreased rate of severe/critical type, increased liver/kidney damage and prolonged period of nuclear acid positivity during virus dissemination, when compared with Wuhan. To investigate the underlining mechanism, we isolated one strain of SARS- CoV-2 (ZJ01) in mild COVID-19 patient and found the existence of 35 specific gene mutation by gene alignment. Further phylogenetic analysis and RSCU heat map results suggested that ZJ01 may be a potential evolutionary branch of SARS-CoV-2. We classified 54 strains of viruses worldwide (C/T type) based on the base (C or T) at positions 8824 and 28247. ZJ01 were both T at these two sites, becoming the only TT type currently identified in the world. The prediction of Furin cleavage site (FCS) and the sequence alignment of virus family indicated that FCS may be an important site of coronavirus evolution. ZJ01 had mutations near FCS (F1-2), which caused changes in the structure and the electrostatic distribution of the S protein surface, further affecting the binding capacity of Furin. Single cell sequencing and ACE2-Furin co-expression results confirmed that Furin level was higher in the whole body, especially in glands, liver, kidney and colon while FCS may help SARS-CoV-2 infect these organs. The evolutionary pattern of SARS-CoV-2 towards FCS formation may result in its clinical symptom becoming closer to HKU-1 and OC43 (the source of FCS sequence-PRRA) caused influenza, further showing potential in differentiating into mild COVID-19 subtypes.

Can you put the desired action and the solution in the first sentence, then back it up in the rest of the post?

The post has an academic style, and academia optimizes for writing articles, not for the articles to be read or impact the world.

If you rub a lamp and a genie appears, better get to the point.

You're most likely not going to get a response from an email or a tweet. To get his attention, put in some legwork.

1- Create a website: http://IhaveaCOVIDsolution.com , On the website, outline your idea, why it would work, put a personal video of a story etc.. 2-Email the website to everyone who knows Bill. Track if he opens it for free with Email Tracking, Scheduling, Templates & Attachment Tracking. 3-If he doesn't open it, tweet it to him. 4-A week later, follow up on your email 5-Find where many of his followers (on Twitter) hang out, which hashtags do many use. Post your website and use that hashtag. Or, tweet each of them individually. 6-Find posts on Quora about Covid-19 solutions, post your idea (for free) and post your website. 7-A week later follow up again with Bill. Also, reach out to other Gates foundation Execs. Reach out to Melinda or Microsoft execs(ex-Msft friends also) and get ignored (will toughen you up). Maybe 1 of them will want a phone call. Find Bill's address, write him a hand-written letter and send the website URL as well.

At some point, he will either:

Answer, quick email from him. Best case a phone call. His publicist will say "Thanks, Bill will look at your ideas." You'll never hear from them again

Maybe he won't answer, but at some point you'll get someone to respond and perhaps become a client to your solution.

Check out the Mercatus Center's 'Fast Grants' program: https://fastgrants.org/

They're giving $10k - $500k grants to fight covid-19, and decisions are made within 48 hours.

Press Release: https://www.mercatus.org/features/mercatus-emergent-ventures...

While 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.

This is likely to run into some hiccups.

When we exterminate species of animals, microbes that inhabit them jump species. It's how they survive.

One of the things that fosters antibiotic resistance is that bacteria mutate at a higher rate in hostile environments.

Different people with different genetics react differently to the same things.

I am not trying to rain on your parade. I'm trying to take you seriously and share my thoughts. I'm sure we all want a solution.

I think we need to up our game on other things. I don't know how to get traction on that. We already know a lot of things that help and we are just not doing a very good job of getting everyone to understand and comply.

If we did, people might dismiss the success as "luck" anyway. Humans have a terrible track record of not knowing how to count the disasters that didn't happen but should have.

Best of luck. I see in comments someone forwarded it to the Gates Foundation. I would be happy to learn I'm wrong and this works.

Summary 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 it] much like the live attenuated (oral) polio vaccine.

The submitter seeks help to test this hypothesis.

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! :)

Presumably 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.

You could reach out to companies like https://lifeomic.com/ ? If they can't help directly, they might be able to steer you in the right direction?

Good luck

So 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 convinced researchers into vaccines right now turn every stone to look for possible ways to make a vaccine as fast as possible. They probably got the idea already and if it's a feasible path someone is working on it.

That said making a vaccine still faces some basic challenges that every medicine faces: You want to be pretty sure that a) it works and b) it has no massive surprising sideeffects. Given that you want to give it to potentially almost everyone on the planet, you want to be really sure.

Variolation is a good idea with or without attenuated virus. That just improves on it.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/03/variolation-may-cut-co...

I'd like to sign up for it either way, assuming medical supervision.

Post your solution on or blog or github with a permissive license. If your solutions is worth anything Bill Gates will come to you.

By reading 'The art of computer programming' (Knuth) from cover to cover :) He'd be more than willing to listen to you then (according to his own words, ironically printed on the backcover of my copy of TAOCP).

Seems overly complex. Why not just inject live virus into people's glutes? At dose low enough to trigger a response hopefully not enough to cause pathogenesis.

Robin Hanson and other public intellectuals are engaged in ongoing debates about variolation, with several variations on that theme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFnP5TK61aI

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/04/wh...

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/04/reply-to-cowen-on-vari...

I know your proposal is not exactly that, but it has some overlap with those ideas. I'd recommend joining those discussions on those blogs.

If yours significantly improved the safety of their proposals, it would be a welcome addition to those discussions.

Note though that it shares some obstacles with widespread vaccinations, in that safety and efficacy testing is the major delay, not the chemistry.

We could alternatively do low dose variolation on the young with technology today, with infectious strains administered through a cut on the shin to encourage lower severity progression. We might lack implementation capacity and social will to try very experimental approaches. If so, "found strain" vaccination will face similar capacity issues while also introducing new questions about safety and effectiveness and requiring significantly more research.

So I'm not sure it's a silver bullet, or how it fares against existing proposals, but seems an avenue worth exploring in parallel, and raising first with others generating policy ideas in this space.

N.b.- Tyler Cowen has a foundation that is actively providing grants or prizes for work on COVID-19, he's not Gates, but not just some random blogger either.

This is a great idea! But why it would be any faster than a vaccine. We already have vaccines, the slowness is testing them. Wouldn’t this method need just as much testing?

Did you get the email we sent you? It contained a repost invite for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22798626. I worry that it might have gone into a spam hole.

(I apologize for hijacking the thread. By the way, invited reposts are related to the re-upping system described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)