As someone else said, the logistical difficulties for this are much larger than the standard jab method, the production process doesn’t scale well, and once prepared it doesn’t last long even if you freeze it. Making this for 20 friends and distributing it to them is very plausibly net-harmful, because you need to gather in close quarters to hand off the prepared vaccine, do it within a fairly short window (1-3 days) for all 20, and then repeat all that, including the production of new doses, at least once per week and ideally 2-3x per week. Given that the only evidence for efficacy is in silico, none in vitro let alone in vivo or in actual humans, it’s not at all clear that the benefits outweigh the increased risk of spread from all that close contact.
Why would they have to gather in close quarters? One person could make it in their kitchen, then leave the room while others come in one at a time to self administer their dose.
20 people sequentially, over a day or two, navigating an unfamiliar kitchen, without contact with the host? Not gonna happen. Most of them, at least, are going to have substantial exposure to the host (and vice versa).
It should not take more than 5 minutes to go in to the room, sit at the one available seat, locate the object placed on a bright red background, and use said inhaler. You open the window and run a fan, so that there is air circulation. If multiple people arrive at once, use cellphones to coordinate who goes in first—the other person sits in their car.
It really isn’t challenging to make this safe, given the audience is “the sort of people who read LessWrong.”
Totally agree, and this is pretty much what I had in mind as well. The organizer can also host a Zoom call beforehand where they explain the procedure, answer any questions, and let people sign up for times spaced out by 5-10 minutes to self administer.
None of that sounds like a thing most people attempting to arrange this will manage to do without exhausting some scarce resources; primarily willpower but also social capital, relationship closeness, and other fuzzy things. People on LessWrong are worse, not better, than the general population, both at weighing those costs and at bearing them.
You don’t need to gather in close quarters. You can simply drop it off in front of people’s front doors and coordinate with mobile phones.
One person does the work of making the doses. Every other person gets tasked with doing one distribution run that they can either do themselves if they have a car/bike/motorcycle or outsource to another person (maybe a taskrabbit). They then travel around and put the microcentrifuge tubes either into postage box of someone or in front of their door when they are there and have the person open the door a minute later to pick up the microcentrifuge tube.
As someone else said, the logistical difficulties for this are much larger than the standard jab method, the production process doesn’t scale well, and once prepared it doesn’t last long even if you freeze it. Making this for 20 friends and distributing it to them is very plausibly net-harmful, because you need to gather in close quarters to hand off the prepared vaccine, do it within a fairly short window (1-3 days) for all 20, and then repeat all that, including the production of new doses, at least once per week and ideally 2-3x per week. Given that the only evidence for efficacy is in silico, none in vitro let alone in vivo or in actual humans, it’s not at all clear that the benefits outweigh the increased risk of spread from all that close contact.
Why would they have to gather in close quarters? One person could make it in their kitchen, then leave the room while others come in one at a time to self administer their dose.
20 people sequentially, over a day or two, navigating an unfamiliar kitchen, without contact with the host? Not gonna happen. Most of them, at least, are going to have substantial exposure to the host (and vice versa).
It should not take more than 5 minutes to go in to the room, sit at the one available seat, locate the object placed on a bright red background, and use said inhaler. You open the window and run a fan, so that there is air circulation. If multiple people arrive at once, use cellphones to coordinate who goes in first—the other person sits in their car.
It really isn’t challenging to make this safe, given the audience is “the sort of people who read LessWrong.”
Totally agree, and this is pretty much what I had in mind as well. The organizer can also host a Zoom call beforehand where they explain the procedure, answer any questions, and let people sign up for times spaced out by 5-10 minutes to self administer.
None of that sounds like a thing most people attempting to arrange this will manage to do without exhausting some scarce resources; primarily willpower but also social capital, relationship closeness, and other fuzzy things. People on LessWrong are worse, not better, than the general population, both at weighing those costs and at bearing them.
You don’t need to gather in close quarters. You can simply drop it off in front of people’s front doors and coordinate with mobile phones.
One person does the work of making the doses. Every other person gets tasked with doing one distribution run that they can either do themselves if they have a car/bike/motorcycle or outsource to another person (maybe a taskrabbit). They then travel around and put the microcentrifuge tubes either into postage box of someone or in front of their door when they are there and have the person open the door a minute later to pick up the microcentrifuge tube.
Besides the distribution methods already proposed, one could depending on the circumstances, simply distribute it outside with masks.