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by 1bent 1129 days ago
I think you're responding to your interpretation of the title, rather than the article.

They aren't proposing increasing asymptomatic disease, they're discussing trying to reduce damage done to individuals.

1 comments

Right, but that shifts treatment of the disease from being mostly focused on elimination to a mixture of elimination (you're right that the article makes it clear that these researchers are not advocating abandoning elimination altogether) and building tolerance. That's inevitably going to shift focus away from trying to rid the patient of the virus when building tolerance is a more productive approach.

Which 100% sounds like the right approach to take and I don't consider this immoral or wrong or anything, just unfortunate.

It's both. You try to prevent the disease, but for those who get infected anyways, you try to improve their tolerance. In fact this research could potentially benefit the immunocompromised the most, in that they can't rely on their immune system to prevent buildup of pathogens so when they get sick they will likely end up with a larger number of pathogens compared to an individual with a healthy immune system. If research can find ways of stopping that larger buildup from damaging the body, then being immunocompromised is no longer as dangerous for the individual.

However, for those that have a weak immune response and also don't or can't get this new tolerance treatment, it would be a net negative, on that I can agree.