That is very interesting Stranger!
Given that the safety profile of the OPV is well known I wonder has fast this can be put out in trials? There seems little risk of harms.
But why should poliovirus be such a strong trigger of the innate response compared to other RNA virus?
Yeah, you could essentially skip the Phase 1 safety trials because they’ve already been done and the vaccine has a very low incidence of adverse effects.
Unknown; the Russian literature, such as it is, just describes it as “viral interference”. It may be that because OPV used live attenuated virus that it actives functions in the innate immune response that an attenuated virus does not bit I haven’t seen any specific mechanism clearly identified. And to be clear, there is currently zero clinical evidence to date that OPV will be effective in protecting people specifically from SARS-CoV-2, nor is there an expectation that it will be effective in treating ongoing cases of COVID-19, so while it may be another arrow in the quiver (if it shows efficacy) it is not a miracle cure; at best it probably provides some measure of protection for some duration of weeks or months. One unknown, of course, is that OPV is rarely given to the elderly, so how much protection it might provide in general is really unknown even if it is demonstrated to work on younger people.
But OPV is cheap and easy to produce because we have an existing infrastructure to do so, and is really easy to distribute even to developing nations which are at enormous risk for co-morbidities or concurrent epidemics, so it is definitely something to keep an eye out for. If it works it is probably best used as a prophylactic to prevent outbreaks from becoming mass epidemics, e.g. if we see an outbreak occurring in subSaharan Africa, or say, Florida because everybody decides to go get a haircut, OPV could be distributed to the entire population to prevent uncontrolled spread of the virus as much as possible, creating a quasi-herd immunity that could at least last long enough to suppress an outbreak.
Stranger
If it does have a few week long immune response than from my layman’s POV, isn’t that’s gold for high risk professions like medical workers, hospital staff and police officers and possibly a good idea in crowded places like prisons?
That was my thought-- rather than give it to the vulnerable folks who can self-isolate, give it to those who can’t avoid exposure. Or both, if there’s enough. Hell, I’ll take one if there’s any left over.