Funding will target broad-spectrum preventatives and advanced air-cleaning tech.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Bill Gates are putting $500 million in funding into a new organization called Intercept. Intercept's goal is to prevent the common cold and the flu, and eventually eliminate all respiratory viruses completely.
Many users praised OpenAI, Anthropic and Stripe's $500M nonprofit to eliminate respiratory viruses as great news worth supporting, while others strongly objected over risks to natural immunity, safety for children and ethical hubris.
No Digg Deeper questions have been answered for this story yet.
Sholto post:
There are a lot of "you should put Far-UVC in daycares!" posts recently.
No, you should not.
How does everyone see this working? What's the pitch going to be to parents? "Hey folks, we're going to bathe your kid in random dosages of UV light for a few year. It's this new stuff. No, we don't have an established safe dosage for children, and no there are no specific studies on kids under 5 years old and yeah, infants can have greater UV sensitivity than adults but we're pretty sure we're good."
Good luck?
What parent in their right mind is going to sign their kids up to be bathed in unspecified amounts of some newfangled ultraviolet light all day long because it's safe for adults?
When they ask their pediatrician which one is going to say "sounds good to me, babies and long-term exposure to a portion of the UVC spectrum with an unknown effect on infants, let's have a try👍🏻".
There are zero studies on Far-UVC and children specifically, and you can't extrapolate from adult safety studies because we know children respond to UV differently.
Children and Ultraviolet Radiation https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9028979/
Infant stratum corneum is about 30% thinner than that of adults- that's the part that blocks 222nm light. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19804498/
Kids' eyes have higher UV transmittance- we don't know if that goes for 222nm light also. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3872277/
Even if you get the ok from parents, maintaining that is going to be a nightmare when they start telling their friends and family, "It's some kind of UVC..."
Daycares are probably among the least effective places to deploy it. The level of direct contact, shared toys, and general spit-smearing with 0-5-year-olds is off the charts. This is why estimates from cage-to-cage animal aerosol studies, even adult human studies, map so poorly. 5-year-olds have no bubble of personal space.
This study used ferrets as a proxy for young kids😂, which, to be honest, I think is pretty fair:
Ventilation does not affect influenza virus transmission efficiency in a ferret playpen setup https://sciety.org/articles/activity/10.1101/2023.12.26.573248
"The ferrets interacted in a shared space that included toys, similar to a child care setting."
This, and similar studies, suggest that once significant fomite transmission is in play, aerosols matter a lot less. If they are all sticking their fingers in their mouths and handling the same toys, it doesn't matter what they are breathing.
If you want to have a significant impact on fomites (which is tough because surfaces are in shadow, GUV does not penetrate seams, cracks or soft toys etc), you're going to have to bathe your wee test subjects in absolutely massive power levels.
If you wanted to just "put Far-UVC in day cares", at a minimum, you'd need the following:
Photobiological consultation- should that be monitored? If so, how? What assurances can be offered to parents, based on what peer-reviewed data, that their kids aren't being used as UV guinea pigs?
Pediatrician consultation- are they comfortable with this if parents come to them? What would they like to see to get comfortable? If they aren't, parents will drop out before the study is completed, and there's no point in starting.
It would not hurt to conduct a small, informal focus group with parents to gauge their receptiveness and what they would like to see before they agree.
If any of the children at the daycare facility gets keratitis- get even pink eye- from any cause- and the docs find out you've been bathing them in UV all day, everyone involved is completely fucked and will 100% deserve it for not doing their homework and making sure in advance. It will do more damage to Far-UVC than those crypto bros in Hong Kong did with the wrong UV lights.
Certainly, Far-UVC can eventually play a role in protecting childcare facilities. It's probably safe for sensible home use at modest dosages- not blasting over the baby's crib. But rolling it out at daycare facilities, at the dosages needed for an effect in that environment, without more data, is a spectacularly bad idea and should be considered professional misconduct for anyone involved.
The good news is there are no respiratory viruses that cause infectious disease, so this problem is already solved. At zero cost. What you are reporting here is obviously a cover story for something far more nefarious that will target human beings to cause harm or death, not to prevent infections. If Bill Gates and Big Tech are involved, it's a depopulation program, plain and simple.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/24/1139621/stripe-anthropic-and-openai-are-backing-an-effort-to-stop-respiratory-infections/
Reposted with the slightly lower figure of $500 million rather than billion.
@AndrewCurran_ They know what I've been saying all along (for years now). There is no longevity while infections like these exist.
These MIT guys always get the OpenAI biology scoops, must be a personal connection with the lab.
@sdamico If you want to run this experiment and know a daycare that wants in we’ll happily donate Aerolamps to the cause. @vivian_belenky can advise on how many you’d want for a standard daycare.
@sdamico Don't know about complete eradication, but even modest improvements in air filters have significant effects. The Finnish and Helsinki studies showed pretty amazing drops in infection rates with standard air filters.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2950362024000043
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.25.24314350v1
It’s a bad week if you’re a respiratory virus!
Yesterday, Stripe announced Intercept, a $500m initiative to end respiratory infections.
Today, my team and I at @ARIA_research are announcing 11 teams we’ve funded with £57m toward the same goal.
A 🧵 about their exciting work!
@cheafofstaff @alpha46837867 You mean 𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘦 the carriers?
First we have “Universal Vaccines” led by Bali Pulendran at Stanford.
Building on strong mouse data published in Science back in Feb, we’re funding Phase I/II clinical trials to see if his team’s approach can protect humans from flu. Will be the first validation in humans if so!
@drethelin @sdamico @vivian_belenky Has anyone stopped for even a moment to think of the ethical & safety implications of this? Apparently not, which tells me a lot about Aerolamp as a company 🫤.
Immune systems tend to be useful... also complicated.
For example infections early in life are protective against childhood leukemia. Immune challenges seem to prune pre-leukemic cells.
I'm all for less kids dying of respiratory infections and not trying to shit on $500M being lit on fire to make a dent... but idk if trying to sterilize the environment is the path.
I'd put my money on targeted immunomodulation.
@AndrewCurran_ They should focus on Epstein barr and the HHVs. Or they could admit there is a mutant adeno/covid virus that got released by Bayview emergent and the makers of Jnj and AstraZeneca and fix that if they really want to be useful.
@sdamico i think it's def worth trying but i think the mouth-hand-mouth vector is really significant for little kids
@AndrewCurran_ humans lose basic influenza immunity capacity one bad flu evades this work every dies
good job team
@AndrewCurran_ @alpha46837867 The easiest way to do this is to eliminate the carriers
@AndrewCurran_ If y'all could solve asthma next I'd appreciate it
@sdamico Or do it 90% outside.
