> On July 1, 2014, six sealed glass vials of smallpox dated 1954, along with sample vials of other pathogens, were discovered in a cold storage room in an FDA laboratory at the National Institutes of Health location in Bethesda, Maryland. The smallpox vials were subsequently transferred to the custody of the CDC in Atlanta, where virus taken from at least two vials proved viable in culture.[130][131] After studies were conducted, the CDC destroyed the virus under WHO observation on February 24, 2015.[132]
Its one of the oldest vaccines. We started giving it in the 1800s and it was eradicated in the 70's. If immunity waned, it would have been noticed back when smallpox was still a thing by people getting smallpox.
They were transported to the existing, single approved location for processing these samples before being cultured. So the risk may not have been any more than existing research at that facility.
I was always under the impressions, that they keep the samples frozen in some big "freezer", and that they don't poke them around and "play" with them... so opening an unknown vial of an unknown sample of possibly smallpox, having the sample analyzed, and all the procedures needed for that, seem (to me) more risky than just keeping the freezer running.
People make mistakes under pressure. So it's a good idea to induce limited pressure from time to time. Having to go through the proper preparations to analyze these samples was probably a valuable and rare training opportunity.
Analysing unknown samples is part of the mission of these facilities, think about studying a new pathogen from human or animal samples for example. It’s fairly routine for them. They have the equipments and know how to do it safely.
In this case, I think it was done to assess the risk of this kind of discovery in the future. If these samples had failed to be viable that would have been a huge relief for everyone.
If you’re trying to decide how big a risk it is that there are other vials out there, definitely. Especially since we’ve stopped wide spread vaccination as it’s considered eradicated.
If some gov’t lab deep in Siberia has some samples - how big a problem would i be? actually?
Spritz it on some freshly laundered towels in a 5-star hotel (lots of international travelers) and you have a hot mess fast. Same thing in a Motel 6, you get longer dwell the in the first country before it spreads overseas.
That was the 80’s and 90’s ‘wake up in a cold sweat’ nightmare, when one wasn’t having it about nukes, the Cold War, and MAD anyway.
One can hope that anyone with the resources and intelligence to pull that off, would 1) have something better and more useful to do with their lives, and 2) would have someone they care about somewhere and realize it would almost certainly blow back on them too.
Definitely not guaranteed, but so far seems to be panning out. Let’s hope it stays that way.
I've always thought the smart move would be a first strike with nukes followed up with aerial application of weaponized smallpox over non-nuked areas. The nukes would slow down and hamstring efforts at containment and let the biological agents get a good foothold.
Can't blame them (us) too much. It was unprecedented, and all previous dangerous fledgling pandemics in the past 10 years did just stop in time somehow. H1N1, MERS, SARS, Ebola etc.
I don’t think that people understand how relatively practical this is, and it wouldn’t even have to be a dramatically or overtly “bad” virus to have very useful economic effects. Just a virus that dramatically increases the chance of cancer, or screws with nuerons low key causing early onset dementia after years, or whatever.
The incentives that support this type of research will be (or are) too high to ignore.
Honestly I am more concerned with the transport. If I had found the samples I would consider burning down the lab.
Sorry, but the end of Smallpox is one of the greatest medical success stories ever. I am not going to be the one who reopens that particular Pandoras box.
I mean sure an outbreak would be pretty horrific. But once the pictures start circulating, I suspect vaccine hesitation would evaporate pretty quickly.
Yes, yes, we should go far to avoid an outbreak, but would it really be so world ending? Wouldn't we just contain it, vaccinate widely and be done with it?
We are barely able to vaccinate against a global pandemic as it is. Our society would honestly probably crumble if you brought in a really deadly virus like smallpox to the fold.
Not for lack of people being willing to take the vaccination though.
People look at risks and benefits and generally make their minds up pretty rationally, if you account that not everybody values things exactly the same as you do.
Covid is really not that much of a risk if you're otherwise healthy and the vaccines are not highly effective as the smallpox one is (in fact stated definitions of vaccine had to be revised so it would not be excluded). The absolute risk reduction is just not all that high, and some people are disinclined to jump to getting new therapies without much long term data.
You see the rational behavior play out when you look at vaccinations by age. 98% of people over 65 in the US have had one dose and 86% have had two. Because that's where the risk gets higher. Elderly people are not vastly better educated, smarter, less susceptible to propaganda, or lean toward political ideologies that are more inclined to take it, or have significantly easier access to it.
It's just that they get more benefit from the vaccine and they understand that and act accordingly.
If there was an especially transmissible smallpox epidemic killing 30% of people who contracted it and a vaccine that provided lasting immunity to 95% of people who took it, 99.something% of people would take it I bet.
A comment like this got me banned from reddit, stating I was downplaying the risk of Covid.
Not saying covid is not dangerous, it really is, but just looking at numbers even diarrhea kills 10M people yearly. It's just not visible to us in the western world and not picked up by the media.
A lot of people can't cope with hearing about different peoples' perspectives or learning about new ideas that might contradict their own beliefs. They don't go on the internet to be challenged, they go on it to be comforted and assured that their beliefs are right and that other people believe the same things.
> People look at risks and benefits and generally make their minds up pretty rationally, if you account that not everybody values things exactly the same as you do.
But what about when how they value things is not rational?
Consider for example people who are rejecting COVID vaccines because they believe that they contain luciferase (they don't, BTW, although luciferases were likely used in the development of the vaccines). Why, you might wonder, would someone care about whether or not the vaccines contained bioluminescent enzymes?
I've seen two reasons. (1) somehow the bioluminescent enzymes are supposed to make it so the government can track you, and (2) the name comes from the word "lucifer" when clearly means that the vaccine is the work of or promotes Satan.
If someone truly believes either of those things then arguably it is rational for them to decide that the risks of the vaccine outweigh the benefits, but nevertheless I would not call their overall behavior rational.
Quite a few of the reasons for rejecting COVID vaccination given by people who end up as the subjects of /r/HermanCainAward or /r/CovidAteMyFace posts would apply just as well to smallpox vaccination, and quite a few of those people are in high risk COVID groups or situations.
I'm talking about the vast majority of people who are not vaccinated because they just aren't inclined to rush to get new medical treatments of little benefit to them.
Do the stats for the over 65 group honestly not make the situation clear to you? Focusing on the 0.1% lunatic fringe doesn't help your understanding, and it's the reason so many people are utterly baffled by what is easily explainable. Life is not the 20 loudest and most obnoxious twitter accounts.
There are many people who don't make their vaccination decisions out of a mystic adherence to the very concept of a vaccine, but based on what they perceive to be a cost-benefit analysis (with the level of rigor varying wildly, naturally).
Unlike covid, there's no large cohort of the population for which smallpox is a fairly negligible personal risk, and smallpox outbreaks provide much more dramatic and visceral evidence of their harms than covid does (not sure if you've ever seen an image of smallpox).
The lessons of covid vaccine hesitancy are barely applicable to a hypothetical smallpox outbreak.
Highly disagree. Most people make their vaccination decisions, like most other decisions, based on highly biased information that they have obtained from others around them. There is little "cost-benefit" analysis being done when you aren't actually comparing the real costs and benefits, but rather an extremely skewed interpretation you hear from the bubble you're in.
Given that, regardless of the actual risk or visceral evidence provided, almost anything can be spun as a positive or negative with enough determination, and on the heels of a major anti-vax campaign with Covid, there would be sure to be major overlap between the two were a smallpox outbreak to occur right now.
The first vaccine hesitancy campaign literally was against the smallpox vaccine in Stockholm, so I don't see how you could say that there would be no hesitancy to it. History has already shown that to not be the case over and over again.
> based on highly biased information that they have obtained from others around them. There is little "cost-benefit" analysis being done when you aren't actually comparing the real costs and benefits, but rather an extremely skewed interpretation you hear from the bubble you're in.
You're talking about the quality of the cost-benefit analysis, which I alluded to in my charitably-phrased parenthetical about rigor. That doesn't mean it isn't a cost-benefit analysis, and doesn't make it the same thing as religious adherence to pro- or anti-vaxxing. While some portion of the population engages in this approach, my point is that it's a lot fewer than most people think. That doesn't mean I think the cost-benefit analysis is high-quality, but that modeling these people as dogmatically irrational instead of very bad at being rational is misleading.
In stark contrast to Covid, the nature of smallpox outbreaks makes it so that even an extremely dumb person nominally engaging in cost-benefit analysis would have little trouble making basic inferences about the outcomes faced by people they knew who contracted it vs people they knew who didn't. I got vaccinated because I estimated that my low risk of a bad time after contracting Covid was higher than my low risk of a reaction to the vaccine. If for some reason, I didn't have access to the vaccine, it very likely would not have materially changed my young, healthy, no-comorbidity life.
There's another trivial rebuttal of your hypothesis, outlined in a sibling comment:
> You see the rational behavior play out when you look at vaccinations by age. 98% of people over 65 in the US have had one dose and 86% have had two. Because that's where the risk gets higher. Elderly people are not vastly better educated, smarter, less susceptible to propaganda, or lean toward political ideologies that are more inclined to take it, or have significantly easier access to it.
In your model of most people as not considering the cost-benefit tradeoff of vaccines, how do you explain the significant age disparity?
> The first vaccine hesitancy campaign literally was against the smallpox vaccine in Stockholm
This was _literally the first vaccine for a contagious illness_. You'd have to be irrational _not_ to have some degree of skepticism about being infected with a contagious disease, especially in an era with a population accustomed to a state with infinitely lower capacity and infinitely lower reach into everyday life. A quarter of a millennium later, in a society where the state licenses and ensures our safety in a trillion different publicly-known ways, the reactions of 1750s Swedes could not be less applicable.
Again, the pivotal difference relative to my framing is the approach to vaccines as an all-or-nothing tenet of religious faith, to be rejected with prejudice or embraced with devotion. This is obviously a fairly popular (implicit) perspective on public health, which makes it easy to lose sight that most people do not think like this, even the dumb ones.
> I don't see how you could say that there would be no hesitancy to it.
Kindly don't put words in my mouth. I said that Covid hesitancy is a different enough context that it's not usefully-applicable to a hypothetical future smallpox outbreak.
Shows how vain society is. If COVID was a harmless and flu-like, but causes a permanent mole on your nose, then I can promise you everyone would get the vaccine.
Once again, two years ago I would have believed it. But considering a sizeable amount of people think that the Covid vaccine "allows governments to track you", "has 5G" or whatever other nonsense has permeated that discourse, I'm not as confident.
Especially if it happened right now with all the controversy around the Covid vaccine, it'd surely be spun as the Covid vaccine in disguise, or the government forcing its way into tracking us all with nanotechnology.
All it takes is one to get away on a subway near an airport. Some of the original vaccine hesitancy was about the smallpox vaccine when it was endemic, so not everyone would take it.
Tangentially, I've been on an SCP [1] binge lately, and it's interesting to see the cues SCP takes from the real world. Your quote could be taken verbatim from one of their stories.
> The frozen vials "were incidentally discovered by a laboratory worker while cleaning out a freezer in a facility that conducts vaccine research in Pennsylvania"
Occam's razor suggests that those were put into the freezer decades ago and forgotten, and if they were moved, no one bothered to read the labels until now.
A smallpox pandemic would be orders of magnitude more deadly than COVID. COVID has a very low death rate and is comparable to the flu, whereas Smallpox kills 30% of people it infects and disfigures an even higher percentage. And my understanding is that it is just as contagious (may be wrong on this).
Read up on Operation Dark Winter (2001 era wargame of a US smallpox outbreak) for details on how this might play out. Spoiler alert - nothing good happens to humanity.
EDIT: I appear to have pissed off a lot of people by comparing COVID to the flu. I apologize, I simply meant that COVID is a lot closer to the flu than it is to smallpox. I am vaccinated and wear a mask everywhere, I am not trying to "downplay COVID" or whatever.
Smallpox is significantly less infectious, and generally requires close and extended contact with a person who is coughing and infectious or a surface recently contaminated by someone with open sores.
Original variant was about half as infectious as measles (the most infectious known human disease), and some of the many of the new Covid variants are very very close (about 80%) as infectious as measles.
Difference between ‘you pass it to your friend’ and ‘you walk by a group of people in the park and they’re infected’
> Smallpox is significantly less infectious, and generally requires close and extended contact with a person who is coughing and infectious or a surface recently contaminated by someone with open sores.
I don't know where you're getting your numbers. Current estimates for smallpox R0 are all over the place (as are the Covid ones, but I digress) and run from 1-20, with contemporary numbers as high as 6:
Measuring R0 is not like measuring a physical constant of the universe, or the seek latency of a hard drive or something. The value varies with time and context, and the best we ever get for a virus is a vague idea of relative infectiousness. Comparing virus X to virus Y based on R0 alone is largely a fool's errand, particularly for a virus that hasn't been in a human in decades.
Smallpox has rather infamously spread between stories of a building from a closed laboratory (this is disputed, but plausible), so I wouldn't be so quick to characterize it as requiring "close and extended contact":
> you walk by a group of people in the park and they’re infected
This has never been documented in the entire history of SARS-CoV2. For that matter, there have been almost no documented outdoor infections, in any context. These hysterical claims need to be put down.
> you walk by a group of people in the park and they’re infected
>This has never been documented in the entire history of SARS-CoV2
This seems like something at risk of being a self fulfilling prophecy. How would something like that be documented? You can't do contact tracing on random people you walk past in the park. Even the contact tracing apps, sparsely used as they are, generally require a 15 minute contact period to "count". We've assumed that it can't happen, but we have no way of knowing if it did happen.
(Anecdata, accompany with 0.36g sodium chloride: I was speaking to someone over the weekend who claims they can pinpoint to a 20-minute window when they got infected (on the basis that they could not have caught it from anyone else that day) and they reckon that they got it from walking down an extremely densely crowded alleyway. Due to a testing screwup, this person isn't even documented as having had Covid at all. Of course, they may be mistaken, but nevertheless it goes to show that just because something happened, doesn't mean it will be recorded.)
You can still make a reasonable assumption even without contact tracing of this kind.
1. We have people getting infected with covid after provable close contact with others that are infected.
2. We have comparably few infections at outside events when people are standing close to each other, but it does happen.
Even if you have no contact tracing for the walk-by infection case, just by looking at numbers 1 and 2 you could extrapolate to non-close contact outdoors not being very infectious.
Or reasoning from another perspective, if walk-by were enough to infect people, everyone would have already had it.
This isn’t hysteria, and I don’t think hysteria is called for.
If smallpox had these numbers, well, that is a different story. But smallpox has had likely thousands of years to evolve higher infectivity, and seems to have reached a local maxima that isn’t there. Covid still has time to explore options.
Those appear to have greatly reduced the basic replication rate to around .9-1.3 or so shortly afterwards. As they are very severe countermeasures, it’s disingenuous to use the reduced replication rate ‘raw’ as no one is going to be doing them ‘naturally’.
The delta variant (B.1.617.2), now dominant in California and elsewhere, is approximately 2x more infectious than that original variant from the data I’ve found, which is limited [easiest thing I could fine here was https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/05/07/9947104...].
Outdoor infection IS less likely - this study of infected construction workers show only 1.4% of their outdoor only co-workers were infected by infected workers, where 43% of people they lived with and 26% of people they had indoor contact with while working got infected. There are many documented cases of outdoor infections, and even more where no known source could be found and all indoor or other sources were ruled out.
New variants driving up infectivity will of course drive this number up over
time if infections are allowed to spread (albeit hopefully vaccination can cut it off at the knees).
What does this mean? Without a vigorous public health response, Covid will continue to spread. It may continue to spread despite a very rigorous response from authorities because the body count is going to be low enough that many people just won’t care.
If we get an unfortunate deadlier variant, then maybe that will change. But one thing appears sure - we’re past the point (if there ever was one) where there is anything easy or pleasant that is going to happen.
Smallpox has been eradicated since the 1970s. There is no other data, and the data that exists doesn't support your assertion. A paper from 2001 is up to date.
Citing point estimates for SARS-CoV2 is not a rebuttal; there are many such estimates, and as I said, they're specific to time and place. The best you can do is compare distributions and look for general trends.
> The delta variant (B.1.617.2), now dominant in California and elsewhere, is approximately 2x more infectious than that original variant from the data I’ve found...That would put it (in a ‘natural’ setting) at R0 being roughly 12-13
You're just making things up. You can't take an old estimate, multiply it by some arbitrary factor, and draw a conclusion from it.
If you measure a (possibly representative) subset of a population (not all of NYC was measured) it's not uncommon to describe that as estimation, not measuring.
R0 unfortunately turns out to be a basically meaningless number for COVID. In theory it is a natural property of the virus. Other measures of R like Rt are then the 'adjusted' rates that take into account environmental factors.
In reality none of these numbers have any scientific validity, as they are usually computed using methodologies that aren't valid. In particular R0 is often simply a free variable in a model, i.e. a fudge factor in which the values are brute forced until the model output comes into line with reported government statistics. What does this fudge factor represent, if anything? Nobody actually knows, so it gets labelled R and then announced as a "fact" by epidemiologists. But then someone else takes a slightly different data set and runs the same calculation, but with a totally different R0 value coming out the other end.
This is certifably false when it comes to covid and the flu:
according to Johns Hopkins University, about 3.1 million people around the world had died of COVID-19 as of April 26, 2021.
The flu, meanwhile, kills between 290,000 to 650,000 people every year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
Using the very numbers you posted, covid is then between 4.7 and 10.6 times deadlier than the flu. If your covid number is the total from the last two years, then it's 2.3 to 5.3 times deadlier than the flu. You don't think it's valid to draw a comparison between the two?
Also those rates would be artificially high, as the elderly, who are overwhemingly the ones vulnerable to both viruses, had a yearly shot to protect them from the flu, but not from covid, until recently. Now that the vulnerable also have a layer of protection from covid as well, that multiple will drop much lower.
You’re completely discounting the whole economic shutdown, masking, and social distancing that took place with COVID? Even with that, it was 2.3-5.3 deadlier in your estimation.
With those countermeasures, the flu season last year was “unusually low throughout the 2020-2021 flu season both in the United States and globally, despite high levels of testing … The low level of flu activity during this past season contributed to dramatically fewer flu illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths compared with previous flu seasons. For comparison, during the last three seasons before the pandemic, the proportion of respiratory specimens testing positive for influenza peaked between 26.2% and 30.3%. In terms of hospitalizations, the cumulative rate of laboratory-confirmed influenza-associated hospitalizations in the 2020-2021 season was the lowest recorded since this type of data collection began in 2005. For pediatric deaths, CDC received one report of a pediatric flu death in a child during the 2020–2021 flu season. Since flu deaths in children became nationally notifiable in 2004, reported flu deaths in children had previously ranged from a low of 37 (during 2011-2012) to a high of 199 (during 2019-2020).“
It’s apples to oranges, but I’d take the Flu over COVID. Because we do have natural immunity and we do have better established vaccines for it.
I didn’t even quote the most relevant part - “During September 28, 2020–May 22, 2021 in the United States, 1,675 (0.2%) of 818,939 respiratory specimens tested by U.S. clinical laboratories were positive for an influenza virus”.
0.2% compared to as high as 30%. So we had 150x reduction in the flu’s prevalence last year from distancing measures. Not saying COVID would have been 150x worse than what we experienced, but it would have been far, far worse than the Flu without the mitigation efforts if you want to try to treat them equally. It was objectively much worse than the Flu last year, not even close. The positive test rate in Oklahoma is >50%![1], but to be fair somewhere between 5-10% looks like average across states. Oklahoma may have limited tests available and/or only test severe cases… Or they are somehow better at testing than other places in the country.
Depends on the definition of deaths. Most people don't get tested for flu. Also, in many cases, died of covid means "had a positive test result within two weeks of death". That's ignoring the dubious reliability of PCR tests in general.
Hi, I am curious, can you elaborate on the "dubious reliability of PCR tests"?
Also, what do you mean by "in many cases" here. Like let's say if you are admitted to a hospital after a gun shot wound and happened to have Covid and die the next day due to the injury -- is it a Covid death?
Depends. I'm know that this is how it's counted in Finland at least. If a person dies within 30 days of getting tested positive for Covid it's counted as a "Covid death".
It is when you look at the flu data. You think the flu kills more people on average? It doesn't, and most people that die from the flu are also elderly or have pre-existing conditions.
Covid killed so many people because it was novel. It'll likely decline year over year as the population either develops antibodies or dies (of covid or natural causes).
There are also big reccurent flu events, like the "Hong Kong" 1968-1969 flu that caused between 1 and 4 million deaths (with half worldwide population compared to today).
In fact, supposedly the analysis of just how bad that flu epidemic had been (and how it had been largely ignored) is what basically created the postmodern version of the practice of epidemiology we still use today ?
This is also something I think is interesting. Covid is from a corona virus strain, but we have many corona viruses circulating already. With the flu every few decades we get a really bad strain. So if you compare the worst corona strain we know with the average flu strain, it's a bit of a biased comparison.
Given the fragility of their population, famine alone from lockdowns could possibly explain that.
Also, this 4 millions study was a laughable hedgepog of disparate data and unwarranted assumptions, basically pseudo-science from economists.
Smallpox is roughly as contagious as SARS-Cov2 Delta and therefore more transmossible than the original variant. However those numbers are the unmitigated numbers.
Public health and other authority figures have some advantages in fighting smallpox versus SARS-Cov2. IIRC, smallpox is not infectious until the "pox" are visible on the body, greatly improving ability to screen for the disease and the vaccine traditional used creates a small but visible scar, again aiding screening.
The world also maintains a significant (300M doses vaccine stockpile in the US as well as other countries) with already approved vaccines that can begin manufacturering immediately.
Finally, smallpox is so deadly and obviously horrific that it "should" help public health officials get past vaccine and other mitigation "hesitantcy".
A smallpox pandemic would truly be devastating and much worse then Covid19, but thankful there is reason to believe outbreaks could be controlled before pandemic status was reached.
One of my biggest worries coming out of Covid19 is how epidemiological public health has become tied up in political identity and that the next pandemic will see significant portions of the population actively resisting outbreak control measures.
Based on what I’ve been able to find, Delta would have a ‘raw’ (without extensive countermeasures) R0
of 12-13 (original Covid was measured in NYC pre-masking and lockdowns at 6.4). Do you have cites for the other numbers you have?
Totally agree on severity (or lack thereof) being why it is spreading and thriving. Also the high asymptomatic spread helps too.
You can’t get the consistent, strong response in taking countermeasures you’d get from something more visibly horrific like Ebola.
Though there have been many cases in Africa of someone sneaking in to loot a ‘dead’ village or graveyard and starting a new outbreak when they get home. So apparently even almost certainly dying a horrible death while bleeding from every opening isn’t enough to get everyone to take it seriously.
I didn't look into these numbers to deeply as they seemed to be under active debate and my point was that smallpox is in the range of Delta, not the specific number.
> With smallpox so deadly, how did europeans intentionally put it on blankets given to native americans with genocidal intent?
That's a myth, stemming from Howard Zinn. Zinn basically scoured various underground and left-wing pamphlets, some even anti-american cold war propaganda, and collected that all into an underground history, called "A People's History of the United States". It's wildly popular among a certain subset of the population, who take what's written there as gospel.
Zinn never provided a source for the small-pox blanket trope. Not because he invented it (I don't think he did) but because citing propaganda is not a good look for a historian.
When you try to do some archeological digging of these urban legends, the closest thing you can find in terms of real history is a letter from colonial times when there was a mention of this as a possible war strategy by a British administrator, Sir Jeffery Amherst, but there is no evidence anything like this actually happened during the British rule or after independence.
By the time it reached Zinn, it was turned in US cavalry officers actually giving blankets to Indians in the 19th Century. From then it spun out into popular culture. I think it's even included in the Simpsons.
I had to read Zinn for AP US History in 10th grade, and I fucking hated that shit. The guy would somehow always find a way to spin everything this country did in a negative way. Glad to hear that at least part of it was bullshit.
I'm sorry you had to read that in high school. This kind of stuff is why you see parent revolts.
The problems with polemicists like Zinn or Chomsky is that they go looking for any evidence to support their thesis (namely that America is an evil empire committing atrocities around the globe), which makes for very bad history. I mean, I could mine Swiss newspapers, interviews, selectively quote from some policy papers, and make it look like Switzerland is some violent third world hell-hole if I had enough time and a strong enough obsession to prove my point.
But that's not history, because it doesn't tell you the big picture or the main facts, instead it focuses on things that either didn't happen at all, or were exceptional. People who read that stuff come away with a truly warped view of the world, and then this penetrates into popular sites even like wikipedia. For example, the "US Overthrow" of Iranian Mossadeq or the 1973 Pinochet coup are completely misrepresented, whereas things like US involvement in supporting Algerian rebels and African left-wing rebels is erased. So you don't get an understanding of US policy or the factors driving it, which are not easily reducible to soundbytes or simple analyses. Similarly the anti-communist military action by the Dutch in Indonesia after WW2, the Korean War (Chomsky claims it was the US that was the aggressor), and even key facts about the Vietnam war and the Khmer Rouge are massively distorted.
This results in students having holes where huge parts of history are entirely missing, and have been replaced with hate, and a lot of people emerge from that scene very angry and militant, both at the U.S. and more recently at Europeans in general, which I guess is the whole point of teaching this stuff - to create angry, radicalized, students. I hope you escaped that trap.
We know what smallpox is, how it spreads, how to slow it down/prevent it, and most importantly we will have a vaccine for it in every pharmacy well before it breaks out the way covid did. The two are not at all comparable.
I don't know, covid is much more intangible with flu-like symptoms. Small pox is very visible in a way that's hard to deny and very different from other common less dangerous illnesses so there is less toconflate it with.
I don't think we can grow our smallpox vaccine stockpile that fast. We know how to make them and have the ability, but getting production to scale will take a fair amount of time.
Smallpox vaccine can be grown in people - look at how the original vaccination campaigns got theirs across the ocean before there was refrigeration.
If there was a smallpox outbreak the country the country would go to a sudden stop and everyone would race to be vaccinated, it is that deadly. Unfortunately, Covid is in that uncanny valley where too many people do not care until it hits them personally. That's why we are all fucked.
"we are all fucked" seems like a rather exaggerated conclusion. It's like you're excluding how many people there are who are not bothered even when it hits them personally.
This was one of the bottlenecks that COVID vaccines faced, as well. Researchers made COVID vaccines relatively quickly, and it took a relatively long time for mass production to ramp up.
True, but with mRNA it is a lot easier to pivot. If there by chance had been a flu vaccine using mRNA we would have been able to switch to COVID much faster. Most vaccine technologies don't pivot that fast.
Given that widespread vaccination for smallpox stopped in the 70's, I guess responding to a large outbreak would be a big problem. I'd hope we've got lots of smallpox vaccine stockpiled, though.
They stopped vaccinating against smallpox in 1972[1]. It was administered around 12 months of age before then. So anyone in the US born in 1972 or later is most likely unvaccinated.
COVID is not comparable to the flu. It's 3-20x as deadly depending on a variety of factors.
Smallpox would still be significantly more deadly than COVID individually, but I'd bet people would take lockdowns much more seriously for smallpox than they did for COVID, preventing a pandemic and resulting in fewer deaths overall. Especially because people believe falsehoods like "COVID is comparable to the flu" because it downplays the risk.
Yes, for the entire population in aggregate. But the flu is deadlier to children than covid. Simplistically and reflexively repeating "covid is not comparable to the flu" obscures this fact to some degree. Not saying you are doing this, but making it verboten to compare the two is a bad practice, in my opinion.
The common comparison is used to say “it’s not so bad - it’s just like the flu!”.
You can compare anything you want (e.g. COVID and Cancer outcomes), but to say COVID isn’t so bad because lung cancer doesn’t kill that many people every year is a bad logical fallacy.
The Flu has a vaccination, it’s got natural immunity, and we have a good understanding of it. COVID was brutal even with social distancing measures (where the flu was greatly reduced by the measures last year), so I’m not quite sure what the takeaway is from the comparison.
It's also important, I think, to consider this as time series data. There was a point very early on when the flu actually was more dangerous but it became taboo to say because it was obvious that wouldn't be true for long. However as covid becomes endemic and we get better vaccines/therapeutics/natural immunity, that will be true again. The death and hospitalization rate will settle to a rate comparable to the flu, but we're not there yet.
It’s all about what you’re measuring… Ebola is less dangerous than the Flu in terms of deaths per year, but it’s disingenuous to measure it that way, and that’s what I think is frustrating people in this thread about the comparison to the Flu.
But I am with you - I think this will settle in at some point, and it will be as back to “normal” as we can, with just some people dying of COVID instead of Flu or Pneumonia or whatever would have eventually taken them before.
The vast majority of people don’t want to be super-spreaders. No one thinks they are actually being a super-spreader, but COVID presents as either asymptomatic or as mild allergies for a portion of the population. Which makes it really hard to wrap one’s head around and a wicked problem from a public health standpoint - “It’s not so bad it’s like a mild cold - why should I change my life for that?” or “Wait, you mean my slight cough can end up killing the people I might infect if I go out tonight? But to me it just feels like seasonal allergies. It’s probably not covid”. Ideally the vaccinations will reduce the number of people who die from a mildly symptomatic person going out by some factor of x. Because we can’t have everyone with seasonal allergies shelter in place forever.
It’s impossible to determine how many people will die from the infection that a mildly symptomatic person has if they go to the mall. In aggregate, it’s not zero (otherwise the pandemic would run its course and not be a problem). Sure, even if it’s a 1% chance someone with mild symptoms transmits COVID if they go to a busy shopping mall, that person has a 1% chance of death. But then they may spread it. So maybe it eventually results in .01, 0.1, 1, or 10 people dying per mildly symptomatic person going shopping? There are so many variables it’s nearly impossible to model, and every variable is now a political issue (contagiousness, are deaths really caused by COVID, vaccination rate, masking and distancing). And if the virus mutates and becomes the next more contagious variant in that person, then it could be hundreds of thousands of people.
But at some point, we have to say “OK - can’t test everyone, we have enough vaccinated people to be good, and this is reality - we need to accept a 0.01 “death factor” for this disease when a mildly symptomatic person participates in society. And I do think (or hope) that eventually that factor will line up more closely with the Flu - or ends up better than the flu’s factor (which is non-zero, but it’s a fact of life so we just keep it moving through Flu season).
To be fair, we don’t know if the population of people at the mall would die at the same rate as what COVID is doing overall with the population.
I think Black Plague was like 60% fatality rate and killed so many people that it's theorized it paved the way for the enlightenment by disrupting entrenched economic stratification.
Covid is essentially the flu compared to a real historical pandemic.
"comparable" was interpreted to mean "similar risk profiles", which is not true.
We don't have a recent smallpox outbreak to compare to for mortality with modern medical treatment. It's possible smallpox is only 5% deadly these days, we just don't know.
This is a good history on the effects and changing forms of treatment.
"The case-fatality rate varied from 20% to 60% and left most survivors with disfiguring scars. The case-fatality rate in infants was even higher, approaching 80% in London and 98% in Berlin during the late 1800s."
Depends on the flu, and on how effective that year's flu vaccine is. The 1918-1919 flu had its highest mortality rate in the young adult range, where it was unquestionably higher than covid-19 (although the lack of PCR tests or equivalent back then make it difficult to arrive at precise numbers infected). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Epidemiology_and_p...
Comparing modern death rates to the 1919 flu, and to historical smallpox infection, is not useful. Medical technology has come a long way in a century and so average mortality rates have dropped for all diseases.
2019 and 2020 had particularly dangerous flu seasons and were still significantly less deadly than COVID.
The 2020-2021 flu season was the mildest flu season on record. In the US, there were only about 700 influenza deaths in the 20-21 season, compared to 22,000 in the 19-20 season, and 34,000 in the 18-19 season. Similar trends were seen around the world.
Also, the principal advantage modern medicine had in these flu seasons, compared to 1918-1919, was that we had an effective vaccine for the most at-risk population to take, and the most at-risk were not the ones most likely to be out and about working. I've never seen a convincing explanation of why the 1918-1919 flu hit young adults the hardest, but whatever the reason, we're really lucky covid-19 did not work that way.
Give the benefit of the doubt. It’s certainly deadlier but still comparable in the scheme of things relative to a 30% death rate virus. I’m vaxxed and have a booster, mask up, and def not a denier but it’s true that the death rate of covid is fairly low for most folks.
It doesn't take that much. If you're good enough at DNA build from oligos, could probably synthesize it with less than a PhD. It is expensive though, and very unlikely that anyone would actually do it in a way that evades the surveillance systems.
How much harder is it than the process of building your own bacteria from a DNA sequence...? Would just tacking it into a bacterial DNA sequence and being lucky end up in replication of it?
I remember when I looked into it that about $5k of equipment scrounged from ebay and stuff being trashed from labs was probably enough for making your own bacteria.
It's a bit more complicated, like how you can't just take a Mac binary, put it on a Windows computer and expected it to run just because it uses the same x86 machine code.
Commercial oligonucleotide synthesis companies will check sequences submitted to them against databases of 'dangerous' or regulated sequences. Flagged sequences won't be synthesized. This was designed to prevent someone from ordering parts of a dangererous virus sequence for assembly of the complete virus.
I've also wondered if there is some sort ability to order innocuous sequence A from company a, innocuous sequence B from company b and then in the privacy of your own lab do the DNA synthesis equivalent of A xor B to get dangerous sequence C.
I think it would be hard to get all the required fragments without raising red flags. There aren't that many synthesis companies and it would take a lot of fragments. Assuming you could get the fragments, its getting easier to assemble (join) them quickly. A 40000 base pair T7 bacteriophage genome was recently assembled from 52 parts in a single reaction (one tube)!
Fragment issues aside, the kind of stuff I'm thinking about is somewhat like homomorphic encryption at a genetic/biochemistry level to side step regulations.
And if they are the next logical question is 'are the machines that make the machines themselves treated like like nuclear proliferation/dual use tech?'
Is that actually possible? Labs have to prepare biological samples before freezing them. Otherwise, ice crystals will destroy any cells or viruses that they are trying to preserve.
> Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, said that smallpox can be lethal “even after it is freeze-dried.”
For context, the vials were probably found in a -80C or liquid nitrogen -140C freezer, so they are highly unlikely to be freeze dried (assuming they were properly sealed).
For additional possible context, it's not at all uncommon in the biomedical research world for vials to be forgotten in these freezers for decades. The classic situation is that a student or postdoctoral fellow has boxes in the freezer, and graduates or leaves without cleaning out the boxes. The boxes remain protected and ignored by producing a powerful "Somebody Else's Problem" field [0], usually until the need for freezer space becomes desperately dire (which I'm guessing is what happened here).
Given that likelihood, AND that this was a lab working on vaccine research, and that they found vials labeled "smallpox" and "vaccinia" (virus used to make the smallpox vaccine) side by side, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the CDC's concern were justified.
As I mentioned this years ago here I once found microscope slides in my grandpa basement labeled small pox. He was a doctor/ scientist. Everyone said that the slides would contain inactive virus that were of no threat. I’ve long gotten rid of them because I haven’t owned a microscope in ages and with the internet can always look up small pox there.
Good question. I never tried to look at them under the microscope so I have no clue what they showed. But I have no doubt there was a slide of small pox since after my grandpa died we found all sorts of weird shit in his basement. Big jar of mercury, giant moths, frogs, strange bugs in jars of formaldehyde and some even weirder shit.
The articles on this are very clickbaity. Bill Gates did not warn of a small pox attack. He used it as an extreme example of bio warfare which the world can prepare against through investing more in desease & epidemic research.
Why would it be labelled "smallpox" and not "Variola"? Smallpox is not a virus, it's a condition caused by the Variola viruses. That's like labelling a sample of HIV as "AIDS"
If I were going to label a vial that held an extremely deadly but extinct-in-the-wild virus, I would label it in such a way that anyone who stumbled upon it would immediately know what they had so that they could take appropriate action. "Variola" just doesn't do that.
A passing mention in the middle of the article caught my eye:
> a total of “15 questionable vials” with five labeled as “smallpox” and 10 as “vaccinia.”
Had I misremembered the etymology of “vaccine”? Was this a typo? Turns out to be an interesting story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccinia); TLDR, the actual origins of the smallpox vaccine are surprisingly murky (due to a lack of early record-keeping), so when scientists discovered that the virus they were using to make it was actually a separate, otherwise unknown species they used the name that Jenner had originally applied to the cowpox he used for his early vaccinations.
I'm curious what kind of privileged insight could Gates have when he's just a billionaire with no expertise and special clearance in this domain? Or is this such a high likelihood scenario that it's the first thing any billionaire would come up with?
You don't have to go far to find a book written pre-2019 that outlines the pandemic that just occurred down to a T. This is something a lot of smart people hypothesized and it's something a lot of people took seriously. Indeed the catchphrase for it was probably "when, not if". I sure didn't think Gates sounded apocalyptic or unrealistic when he did his TED Talk about the future pandemic. It was all stuff I already knew! I just didn't expect it quite so soon.
Well he isn't "just a billionaire with no expertise or special clearance in this domain". He has spent more time working on vaccine distribution and disease eradication than he spent as CEO of Microsoft. He founded and leads an organization that operates in this domain. He's literally one of the leading global experts in this domain.
I don't understand why more people don't realize this. I feel like a lot of people would consider a biology major who hasn't been in school for 20 years more of an expert on this sort of thing than Bill Gates, all because the student has a piece of paper saying they took like 12 classes loosely related to the subject.
It's like the people who argue that "Elon Musk is a rocket engineer in title only" because he went to school in physics rather than engineering. Like, you don't think being the CEO and lead engineer of SpaceX for almost 20 years is a better education than a 4 - 8 year degree?
It seems super unlikely, but can anyone here help reduce my anxiety that this might be related to the recent Monkeypox cases in the US? [0] Like, the timing doesn't work out, and the person who got infected came from Africa so we're probably not seeing something like community spread... And this would almost certainly be too old to infect people.
Anything I'm missing?
Same family of virus, but not directly related. So, no, there can't be any connection between those events.
Chickens don't transmute into Eagles, notwithstanding both being birds.
Variola is so an obviously scary and debilitating disease that an isolated outbreak would be easily contained. And you're only actively contagious after you become obviously sick.
Huh, I got a smallpox vaccine when I was in the military in 2006. I assumed it was still a common thing, but I guess it hasn’t been done for civilians since the 70s? Crazy.
"In July 2018, the Food and Drug Administration approved tecovirimat, the first drug approved for treatment of smallpox" even though "the global eradication of smallpox was certified by the World Health Assembly on 8 May 1980" could a doctor please explain in what universe this makes sense?
Smallpox is still retained in government labs in the US and Russia, and its genetic information is available and could allow for its synthesis from scratch. The fear is that a bad actor could create and/or set it loose as a bioweapon.
Biotech companies can create vaccines for new diseases within hours of receiving the source code. Why would pharma pay billions of dollars to get a treatment approved for an old disease zero people have?
The rarer the disease the easier it is to get approved. Once approved you can tell doctors can use it for anything, and you can tell doctors what else it "might" work for. Doctors can then buy it for those other things, which they might do. You are supposed to study the other things, but that takes time and a lot more money (to be kind)
Note, the above is an over simplification, good enough for discussion, but not for any other use. Those who the above is useful information for already know many finer details of the above, and how it varies from country to country.
Because it is a disease which has been weaponized by the United States, United Kingdom and former Soviet Union at a minimum.
Not only do diseases escape containment (there was a weaponized Smallpox outbreak in 1971 in the USSR, and Lyme disease is believed to have originated from Plum Island, 2 miles off of Long Island), but there’s a nonzero probability that you’ll have a planned release someday.
I'm not a doctor, but from the looks of the wiki[0], it can be used for other viruses in the pox family. Also, smallpox is considered a major threat for bio-warfare, as multiple nations have it in deep storage. That's why the military is still vaccinated against it.
I'm guessing that since that specific job sometimes leads to free foreign travel, it's better to be vaccinated for as many things as possible before deployment happens.
No, it is that smallpox is a good candidate for a bioweapon, so we want to be sure that our soldiers to be protected against any such bioweapon that an adversary might choose to create. (In fact smallpox was historically used as a bioweapon against Native Americans.)
There have been no smallpox cases in decades, so it is not a concern that you might travel somewhere that smallpox is a concern. It would have to be a deliberate attack.
Separately if anyone wonders why smallpox is called smallpox, it is to distinguish it from the great pox, which is better known as syphilis. The comparison is disfiguring scars for smallpox, versus things like your nose falling off with syphilis.
Thing is, it's ridiculously to create smallpox just from the sequence. A grad student could do it easily. You order DNA in a few parts (the full sequence is one of few things you can't just order), splice them together, transfect it into a cell line and in about a week you're manufacturing smallpox
I don't know, but a team of Canadian researchers synthesized a pox virus in 2018. They say, "this is the first complete synthesis of a poxvirus using synthetic biology approaches."
The methodology required was involved. They point out the difficulties dealing with the hairpin telomeres which would also be encountered with smallpox:
However, poxviruses represent special challenges because of the size (many exceed 200 kbp) and the difficulty of cloning features such as the mismatched hairpin telomeres. Poxviruses also cannot simply be recovered from transfected cells, as the DNA is not infectious.
I actually dread what will happen when this would be come as easy as using a 3D printer you can already buy lab equipment on eBay for a fraction of the costs, order CRISP-R kits online and a lot of really weird supervillain stuff like ordering viruses with a “customized payload”.
Right now you still need a pretty substantial lab and knowledge to pull it off but at some point you might be reading on hack-a-day “How I hacked my food synthesizer to produce Ebola..”
I only hope that our ability to defense against such pathogens would advance at least as fast as we commoditizing the ability to play with proteins and amino acids on a molecular level…
There's a difference between someone coughing through their illness on instagram versus someone covered head to toe with boils. Maybe someone could call it "a somewhat stronger chickenpox" as a method of dismissal, but it'll be difficult.
The world has become deeply un-serious in the last few decades. To the point where I'm not alone in being unsure we can predict any particular reaction, including farcical dismissal.
The amount of people I've heard say "I have a strong immune system" (or some variation), as if that's a defense to COVID, I'm sure would have no problem trotting that out against Smallpox.
When we can make Big Bird promoting vaccination a political issue, I expect the amount of people who would reject a smallpox vaccine would be disturbingly high.
The weird thing about that is the age bracket at greatest risk of dying from COVID were actually vaccinated for smallpox. If that came to pass, the elderly would be watching their children and grandchildren die.
Given the risk of myocarditis and other things against the low risk of my demographic with COVID, I'd rather not take the drug with no long term studies.
Regarding myocarditis from the Moderna vaccine: "For instance, Israel reported <150 cases among five million vaccine recipients; the US military reported 23 among 2.8 million doses. In both cases, young adult males were affected for the most part."
So that's a 0.003% and 0.0008% rate, respectively. And you have a 0.15% chance of getting myocarditis from COVID-19 itself.
Why do you trust these numbers? There are (in all logical likelihood) far more instances of myocarditis than are reported, as well as far more instances of covid than reported. This immediately makes the death rate of covid go down and the rate of myocarditis go up by some unknown factor that nobody can possibly know. A fit, healthy young male has no reason to be vaccinated in such a situation.
As another poster as shown, the risk of myocarditis is incredibly low. Certainly much lower than the risks of contracting COVID without the vaccine. And where are the long term studies of the effects of COVID? I'll take my chances with the vaccine.
I imagine most of the skeptical people would be happy with a smallpox vaccine given it is a real vaccine that provides immunity by injecting an inactive (non replicating) virus. Compared to the latest ones that do something entirely different and at beast provide 'protection' - the CDC changed the definition of the word vaccine to include these latest bunch of jabs.
For every person who is skeptical to the "new" vaccines you'll find a person skeptical to the "old" vaccines, and I'd be surprised if there wasn't significant overlap (i.e. the people saying that they don't want to take the COVID vaccines because they're too new suddenly saying that they don't want to take the smallpox vaccine for $reasons).
You could always put a vial labeled "smallpox" in the break-room fridge. But I have a feeling you will end up jobless, if not incarcerated, as a result. YMMV.
Yeah that would be unfortunate if someone ordered dangerous chemicals, snuck them into your kitchen, and furtively replaced the contents of bottles in your pantry with those chemicals. If only you didn't use those joke labels. What are you even saying?
Luckily you rarely pour oil or vinegar directly into your mouth. Usually you pour it onto something else, and you'd discover that it contains the wrong liquid.
Even correctly labelled bottles can be dangerous. THere was an explosion in my lab when somebody touched a bottle of ether. Please don't make it any harder...
I've often wondered why so many basic chemistry labs kept picric acid in stock. I really have to wonder if it was some sort of very slow practical joke against hazmat disposal teams.
Picric acid's reputation for sensitivity to detonation has somehow greatly inflated in recent decades. It was safely fired out of artillery pieces millions of times during World War I. It was known to chemists for decades before it was considered/known as an explosive:
It has friction and impact sensitivity comparable to TNT (see tables 13.4.6.5.1 and 13.5.1.5) according to the UN's "Classification Procedures, Test Methods and Criteria Relating to Explosives of Class 1":
Is that the one where the urban legend has it soaking into the lab table over the years and then some poor unsuspecting soul bangs the lab table and...
Ethers can form highly reactive (i.e. explosive) organic peroxides when exposed to oxygen, especially over a long period -- for example, when a half-empty bottle is left on a shelf for a few years.
This is the part I knew about, since I had discussed it with the individuals involved when I moved into the office:
"Well aware of the dangers of old ether, Shetlar carefully set the cans in the fume hood next to the cabinet, venting the lids. He went back to work in the cabinet and almost immediately heard a “pop” sound from the hood.
However, if you read further, there are several important bits of data which instead show that it's more likely a second set of ether bottles caught on fire and ignited the one that exploded and sprayed nitric acid on Martin.
>Ethers can form highly reactive (i.e. explosive) organic peroxides when exposed to oxygen, especially over a long period -- for example, when a half-empty bottle is left on a shelf for a few years.
Yeah that's the point. That's why they sell it in cans at Walmart. As long as you're already expecting to handle flammables it's not really a big deal. It's only about twice (in my observation having dicked around with both) as spicy as gasoline.
Handwriting or printer yellow dots can still lead to them.
Sign of times though - calling law enforcement when you find old pathogen and its vaccine in a freezer in a vaccine development lab. MBA types. In order to mentally train myself for an MBA career i need to start calling law enforcement anytime i find a bug in the 20+ years old code.
I actually just got my MBA so I feel extra qualified to answer this statement.
When you see something that does not seem belong where it is, you cannot pretend that did not see it. In fact, willful blindness is a thing. There is a reason CYA has become a well known acronym.
That is an interesting question and I am inclined to answer it, but I don't want to assume the meaning behind it. Could you narrow it down a little to make sure I don't misinterpret it?
> When you see something that does not seem belong where it is, you cannot pretend that did not see it.
1) How do you decide if something “belongs where it is”?
2) If a large proportion of a society agreed on a decision function and behaved as you suggest, is there a straightforward way an adversary could take advantage of this situation?
3) Bonus: Is there evidence this is happening today?
>> 1) How do you decide if something “belongs where it is”?
Experience and training. I just went through somewhat extensive system testing. Without going into specifics, there were several instances of 'expected behavior' vs 'actual behavior'. But this example may be a little too esoteric.
Lets say I walk around my house and see a book nested in a tree growing next to the fence. Does the book belong there? I would venture it does not. Reasonable person standard probably could apply here.
>> 2) If a large proportion of a society agreed on a decision function and behaved as you suggest, is there a straightforward way an adversary could take advantage of this situation?
Yes. And, in a sense, it is already being exploited in most visible way via social media. But I disagree with the phrasing of your question, because I think US society already behaves this way, which is precisely why it is being exploited.
>> 3) Bonus: Is there evidence this is happening today?
Um.. I don't want to sound dismissive, but that mentality is part of society already ( especially if you consider the surveillance US population happily places where they live ).
No law enforcement != no action ("pretend that did not see it").
Hmm. Despite the edit, I still do not see it as strawman. The important piece and this may be the piece missing from this conversation is 'what action did I take?'. It is not that law enforcement is necessary in all, most, or even some instances. The question is whether you IGNORE something that should not be ignored.
Again, it is possible I am not understanding your argument. Please elaborate.
Really? Contacting the CDC after finding "smallpox"-labelled vials in a vaccine research lab sounds like the responsible thing to do and completely unrelated to MBAs.
>calling law enforcement when you find old work in the lab. MBA types.
It's not just MBA types. Needlessly escalating up the chain as a means to shirk responsibility is a broader societal trend. Post "what do I do" about anything anywhere short of a prepper forum and people will tell you to call some external authority, the police, your landlord, a credentialed professional, etc, etc, and wash your hands of the situation. Worse still, they will deride others for taking the responsibility of doing things themselves.
Odds are there's nothing of note in those vials. It's either a joke or the lab was previously doing something that's Nth order smallpox related so someone wrote smallpox on the vials because what's in them bears some logical relationship to something about smallpox, not because it's literally smallpox. And even if there is smallpox in there this is a facility that already works with similarly nasty things so they should already know how to deal with it.
Had the person cleaning the fridge brought this to their supervisor and they decided to dispose of it however the CDC will (there's published best practices for this stuff) people would be screeching about "why didn't you call the .gov to save you" as if the .gov would do anything other than follow the same best practices for disposal with the added extra step of collecting evidence to leave the door open to prosecuting people should they feel the can do so and stressing the crap out of everybody in the process.
Edit: Why don't any of the people that have decided my comment is wrongthink do me the courtesy of explaining why I'm so wrong?
You are wrong because for all questions someone might ask the response is leave it to someone qualified.
I teach my kids how to use a knife. I panic when my baby finds a knife, but when the baby gets a few years older I will make them qualified to hold a knife.
If you are reasonably intelligent and able bodied (able bodied differs depending on the task) you can learn to do anything a human can do. However there isn't time to learn everything there is to know. Some things (brain surgery) take years and have a well earned reputation of being hard. Some things are easy.
Part of disposing of this is proper documentation of your process all along the way. The documentation is probably harder than the actual work. Because mistakes are so dangerous we should put you in prison for attempting to destroy a sample and failing. If you destroy a sample you need to prove you did it correctly, the documentation that you did that should be complex.
You're bringing in character flaws into something that doesn't require them. Nothing is to be lost by treating the vials as live samples and having the appropriate experts deal with them. On the other hand, if you decide that there really isn't a risk -- a conclusion you have no data to support -- and you screw it up, you're going to unleash a pox on the world that is highly contagious and very few are vaccinated against. The 1978 outbreak in the UK [1] really upended many lives. Given the modern political climate in the US, I'm going to guess containment would be next to impossible.
Maybe the risk is low, but the severity is very high. If there's an outbreak, we may never get it contained again. So, follow the appropriate protocols and hopefully no one gets hurt. If it turns out they were a prank or not viable, no one gets hurt either. This has nothing to do with shirking responsibility. It's quite the opposite. Going all cowboy on the handling of the samples would be incredibly selfish. For what? The ability to tell a story of sticking it to the man?
Like the fighter jet pilot who reported all those UFOs … he literally called himself the class clown type in an interview, yet still people believe his story.
I've seen the videos. You sound like them "releasing videos" closes the case for you (otherwise why would you say you are confused about what I am referring to). I would say, not so fast. The video you linked shows a display, not a direct camera view. The display is for a system (FLIR, I think it is, iirc) the development and programming of which his good buddy, best man at his wedding, was involved with in an ongoing manner at the time. I don't have all the answers, but it's quite possible that these two were having a little fun.
Don't take this as a serious analysis, but I can't help but attribute so much anti-covid vaccine mentality to the fact that Covid is NOT a visible disease, and quite frankly, it's lethality is a dice-roll. Perfectly healthy twenty-somethings can be laid-low while retirees can show no symptoms. The disease has to be taken seriously but its variability skews people's perception of it.
Smallpox, on the other hand, is absolutely grotesque in comparison. Highly visible and much more lethal. In terms of human perception I think that fear of catching it would overrule the fear of 'the government' or 'the pharmaceutical companies'. It also probably helps that the Smallpox vaccine has been around for a lot longer.
There is a certain truth to this. I'm listening to the wonderful History of Byzantium podcast, and an episode is devoted to the plague during Justinian's reign that killed maybe 40% of the population of Constantinople. Whole ships of dead sailors drifted the seas. The description of the disease progression caused by Yersinia pestis is awful. People were throwing themselves off buildings to end their suffering. So higher mortality, and more visible, less ambiguous symptoms (like necrosis, giant lymph nodes, etc.).
Not to discount the seriousness of covid at all. I have a relative in his 40s whose life hangs on a thread right now.
There's no need to fear the .gov or big pharma when it comes to smallpox because there's no need to trust them in the first place. The smallpox vaccine is old and very well proven.
I'm having trouble getting good stats on it, but it looks like there were a handful of deaths -- maybe, single or low double digits -- that could be directly attributed to the COVID vaccine.
The smallpox vaccine, if we had to vaccinate the whole country, could cause some deaths too. This pretty old paper estimates somewhere ~200, I've seen an estimate elsewhere of around ~500, can't get a good source on the second one (probably they are in the same ballpark accounting for error bars and population growth since the '60s).
Anyway, all this is to say -- there are definitely complaints to be had about big pharma, but the industry is pretty good at managing measurable risks nowadays. I don't know if 'old and well proven' is quite right. They were working with a different set of tradeoffs -- they had worse tech at the time, expectations were lower (and medicine was generally more dangerous)... but obviously, better than getting smallpox!
I'm not sure, actually. I wasn't able to find any information on the safety of a single dose of saline solution. There is apparently a health risk from being on saline solution for a long time (I guess it hurts your kidneys and some other stuff). Stories about this swamped stories about the fundamental safety of a small amount.
These vaccines do of course have some (rare! and way less bad than getting sick!) side effects. So I'd suspect a saline shot to be less dangerous. But that's a guess.
IIRC, the smallpox vaccine is the one that scars you for life. I bet a lot of people would be afraid of it at first, but a 30% fatality rate is probably high enough to change a lot of antivaxers' minds.
I have a smallpox immunization scar on my upper arm. It's about the size of a quarter and not very ugly. It is trivial compared to the disfigurement that typically came with contracting actual smallpox.
Anecdata, but my smallpox vaccine scar is a small, ~1cm spot.
The risk of "inadvertent autoinoculation" was my bigger concern - if you touch the site before it's fully healed, you can spread the vaccina virus to other parts of your own body. In rare cases it's been known to cause blindness. Fortunately a Tegaderm dressing kept it contained to my shoulder, but damn did it itch like crazy for those few weeks.
Smallpox is much nastier than COVID. After a few days of the nightly news showing bulldozers pushing piles of bodies into mass graves, I imagine vaccine uptake would be better than our current situation.
Can you please not break the site guidelines like this? It's, well, against the site guidelines, and it's also not in your interest. When you post like this, you're hurting your own case, in exchange for the momentary relief of venting/railing against "fools". (I don't mean just you, of course—this is a common problem; most of us have it to some degree.)
Seems significantly more likely than not this current pandemic originated via a lab leak. Although the comment makes it sound like it was on purpose, rather than an accident which again seems most likely.
Sorta. To your point, it hasn't been proven that it's a lab leak, though evidence has shifted toward that direction. My issue with OP's comment is that he stated it was a lab leak with absolute certainty.
It's unfortunate that all of this got politicized, but the fact is that nobody knows for sure where it came from nor does anyone know for sure where it didn't come from.
I would say it's not a waste of time to review what labs are doing all over the world since the stakes are so high.
Over in the other thread, we're discussing Kasparov admitting that China definitely covered up evidence from their Wuhan lab regardless of whether or not they were actually responsible for a leak.
- In that article, Kasparov only says that the Trump administration said that, and then he discusses the discourse around that claim in 2020. He does not "[admit] that China definitely covered up evidence from their Wuhan lab" or anything like that. EDIT: I stand corrected on this point.
- Nobody in that thread has actually yet mentioned that COVID claim (at the time of my comment), they're all sticking to what Kasparov's piece is about, which is mob mentality and group think.
>Invaluable months were lost, time the Chinese Communist Party used to destroy data and spread disinformation about the virus’s origins. We may never know the truth, but we do know there was a coverup.
Maybe we're just interpreting the above statement in two different ways.
I stand corrected on that point and will edit my post accordingly, but there's still absolutely zero discussion about that point in that thread. You even said, "we're discussing" but you haven't even commented there yourself.
>I'm astonished there are people that think like this on HN
you're just probably not aware that Daszak's Wuhan coronavirus gain-of-function program included human testing. It is actually specified in the clear on the EcoAlliance's NIH approved grant for the Wuhan in 2014.
In 2018 he tried to double dip by going to DARPA for money for the human specific virus genetic modifications of the type that later were found present in the COVID-19 which supposedly magically "naturally" appeared right near the Wuhan lab (and thousand kilometers away from its natural brethren) in the late 2019.
I'm astonished that some people on HN still believe in the "naturality" of the COVID-19.
Good luck getting worldwide cooperation on that. I guess it depends on who you are referring to as `we` but unless it's stopped entirely, there's still real risk of non-compliance leading to leaks or bioterrorism.
An AWS outage doesn't directly cause death. Those aren't comparable at all.
A better comparison would be a nuclear program that can't keep its nuclear materials under proper security. And we can all agree those programs should be avoided.
I understand why HN doesn't like speculation in "dirty" topics.
But I wouldn't really blame the average person for wondering about this since we know that Gates & WEF held coronavirus pandemic drills a month before the outbreak happened (or by some accounts of the origins, in the same month as it happened). I think everyone's suspicions of government and individuals tied to it are extra high due to everything from the last 2 years.
It's because Gates has been shouting from the rooftops about the danger of pandemics exactly like ours for years and years but was mostly ignored. Of course his org was continuing to do work related to preparing society for what they thought (and we now know) was inevitable.
WEF/Gates simulation event on pandemic: mid October 2019
Dates of earliest cases in Wuhan: October 2019 (September by some counts)
Sorry, they knew about the outbreak or you're talking astronomical odds, yet they pretended they didn't know about it yet. This is why he's lost face (other than his association with JE)
In the GP's defense, it is not like they posted this article completely out of the blue and on some unrelated topic.
I find it to be an intriguing coincidence that a vial labeled "smallpox" happened to be discovered around the time that "Bill Gates has warned governments to prepare for smallpox terror attacks and future pandemics by investing billions into research and development." It is either a dumb-luck coincidence or some remarkable prescience from Bill Gates. Either way, the article makes no claims on the topic.
No, I don't think this is the beginning of some grand conspiracy. Besides, it is completely within the realm of possibility that a virulent disease like Smallpox could be accidentally or maliciously re-introduced to the world. I see no harm in what the GP posted.
The parent comment was a pretty clumsy dog whistle to paranoid folks who believe Gates to be a sinister puppetmaster who is unleashing pandemic disease on the world. The Infowars audience is very receptive to this unfounded notion. Since the commenter is concerned about the popularity of his posts, I proposed a suitable audience that would be more receptive and would provide the desired positive response.
Did you just see the words "Bill Gates" and jump to your own conclusions, then call out the parent poster based on your jumped-to conclusions?
The article is posted on a mainstream site and describes how Bill wants additional funding to research preventative measures against future pandemics. What is the dog whistle? Where is the sinister puppetmaster references? Where does it say Bill Gates is unleashing a pandemic?
The original article has nothing to do with Bill Gates, but the commenter in this thread posted this wholly unrelated article, pronouncing it "Related", without any other comment to explain the context of the linked article or how it relates to the original story. You need look no further than the other (also heavily downvoted) commenters in this thread to see who heard the dog whistle loud and clear.
Where does the puppet master/unleashing pandemic stuff come into play?
The article of Bill Gates talking preventative measures against future pandemics (including smallpox, which funny enough is related to smallpox vials), has literally 0 conspiracy-related things in it. How can that even be a dogwhistle?
If you post a story about cancer, and I post a semi-related story of Bill talking about cancer prevention, am I also dog-whistling? Is anything that has Bill in it now a dog whistle?
Edit to add: The linked artile even has smallpox in the title. How you can say it is "wholly" unrelated is baffling.
It seems like you've been on HN long enough to know the guidelines so I won't parrot them. I think these type of "assuming worst intent" type of comments don't help the community honestly, they just piss people off more and further polarization. I believe it would have been better had you simply left off the "Infowars" part of your comment.
You seem to be the conspirator here, the linked article from hunterb123 makes no claims about Bill Gates (as a puppetmaster or anything else) but simply quotes what he has been saying at some event.
Only wild if you assume that everyone has the same likelihood of having proximity to such an event. But people involved in smallpox research have a much increased chance because they have (physical) proximity to the places this can happen and those that find them have (secondary) proximity to those that have higher (physical) proximity. And Gates funds lots of these researchers so he has a very, very high likelihood of being withing a few steps of relation to something like this. Think centrality from graph theory. Gates is a very central vertex.
Consider the possibility that since Smallpox has been eradicated for forty years, someone in that lab may have thought nothing of the vials in there until after seeing the recent chatter about it, triggering a Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon in the lab worker, leading them to reporting the dangerous vials.
It's just so silly that people who took the prospect of a global pandemic seriously are looked at suspiciously by conspiracy kooks.
We had so many close calls in the past, including a bunch of Coronaviruses (SARS/MERS/a bunch of serious colds), it was obvious as international travel increased, population density increased and humans further encroached on nature that we would see things like Covid.
Experts had been warning us for years which is why nearly everyone with any brains opposed the idiotic dismantling of warning networks, Chinese CDC teams, and the pandemic response NSC unit under Trump.
“Battling misinformation” these days is more about conditioning people to practice crimestop it seems. Thanks for posting, I hadn’t seen this before, and it’s definitely interesting
