Thanks for making the point about the name. I got in touch with Hanson after his blog post[1] and co-authored a proposal with Hanson and three doctors on low-dose inoculation of respiratory system, gut or skin[2]. We ended up not using the name Variolation since it has too many connotations and it's necessary to distinguish modes of inoculation for vaccination.

I think Hanson's blog post[1] about the general idea of variolation was useful to get discussion going but agree that as stated it was not a good approach.

In contrast, the proposal we developed subsequently focused on making use of human challenge trials[3] (where the control arm of the clinical trial is actively exposed to the pathogen) to search for safer forms of inoculation, hopefully benign.

I disagree with your point that live virus is necessarily a worse form of immunization; I think it actually depends on the route of inoculation and on finding a reasonable dose. I am working on the skin route separately[4] and from this I've learned live-viruses are used in some (many?) of the most successful vaccines (adeno, polio, measles, smallpox)[See appendix in 4.1]. In polio and measles the virus was attenuated, but in the case of adenovirus, it's used in its original wild-type form and inoculated into the gut via oral dose to avoid the primary respiratory infection. Adenovirus is also notable for comparison as it causes an ARDS-like condition and the gut infection (benign diarrhea and fever) was considered secondary and acceptable enough that the US Military doses all recruits this way since the 80s. And although smallpox variolation had relatively high mortality rates, it's unclear how specific the methods in use were. It's possible that the primary (respiratory!) infection wasn't avoided e.g. by the methods of scab snuff (ew!). Lastly, non-live virus vaccines may not provoke a sufficient immune response, e.g. in the killed polio vaccine that was eventually retired. I think this is generally a concern for potential synthetic CoV vaccines as well.

So it seems like the idea from smallpox and adenovirus is to inoculate where the body has a good chance of dealing with the infection (skin and gut, respectively) when the primary infection (respiratory in both cases) is dangerous and there aren't better alternatives. I'm working on the skin route since it seems plausible (it appears skin can be infected by CoV2) and the least risky (almost all reports of associated infections are benign; though there are some reports of skin tissue necrosis). The gut route is also interesting but in my opinion we're too early in the clinical understanding to prioritize it since it is often associated with the primary infection.

I'm just starting to treat this as an open-source project[5]. Please feel free to join!

[1] "Variolation (+ Isolation) May Cut Covid19 Deaths 3-30X" http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/03/variolation-may-cut-co...

[2] "Targeted Immunization of Low-Risk Individuals Using a Low-Dose Inoculation (LDI)" - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gSj-mrjFwswU35RzBnkjTt9E...

[3] https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/221/11/1752/5814216

[4] "SARS-CoV2 Live Virus Skin Vaccine" - https://tinyurl.com/y8ujrcze

[4.1] "Appendix: Live Virus Vaccines" - https://tinyurl.com/y8ujrcze#heading=h.wpx27u7fe2kp

[5] https://sites.google.com/view/open-vax