> Variolation as opposed to vaccination, has the advantage that the only side effect is that you can get the disease itself, but no weird interactions with the immune system.
This seems to me to be a bit of a false distinction: all the symptoms are ultimately "weird interactions with the immune system"; and this is especially true for the more deadly responses to the virus, AFAICT.
That said, after nearly 3 million confirmed cases, we should have a reasonable sample of how the genes in this virus interact with the immune system; it certainly seems to be introducing fewer variables to delete some of these genes than to try adding something else into the mix.
This seems to me to be a bit of a false distinction: all the symptoms are ultimately "weird interactions with the immune system"; and this is especially true for the more deadly responses to the virus, AFAICT.
That said, after nearly 3 million confirmed cases, we should have a reasonable sample of how the genes in this virus interact with the immune system; it certainly seems to be introducing fewer variables to delete some of these genes than to try adding something else into the mix.