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Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory

nytimes.com

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Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory

#111

Post by trevyn »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #76
trhway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m curious, do you see the fundamental vulnerability in this state of affairs?

Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory

#112

Post by influx »

natch wrote: post #81
wincy wrote: post #7

If I were working in a lab I’d think it was hilarious to write “smallpox” on random bottles. Probably good that I work in software and not biology.

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'm confused what you're referring to, since they released videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_M0hLlJ-Q. Are you claiming the pilot faked the video?

Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory

#113

Post by lostlogin »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #76
trhway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good luck getting that mentality ingrained into society.

Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory

#114

Post by BbzzbB »

trhway wrote: post #20
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully they're smart enough not to brag about it now that the feds are involved.

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.

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.

Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory

#115

Post by programmarchy »

14 wrote: post #73

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.

You can see smallpox with a microscope? I thought viruses were too small to be seen except by electron microscopes.

Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory

#116

Post by snerbles »

yosito wrote: post #72
btbuildem wrote: post #47

> In the event of an outbreak, the C.D.C. said, “there is enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate every person in the United States.” I wonder whether the CDC has re-evaluated their scenarios and simulations given the politicization of vaccines during this pandemic.

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.

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.

Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory

#117

Post by trhway »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #76
trhway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No law enforcement != no action ("pretend that did not see it"). Classic strawman. You definitely got your money worth as your post has all the qualities of an MBA type.

Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory

#118

Post by gfodor »

bastardoperator wrote: post #86
IAmWorried wrote: post #33

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.…

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.

A 5x difference largely skewed towards the elderly and obese fits the definition of “comparable”, but ofc this is assumed to be a downplaying tactic.

Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory

#119

Post by bee_rider »

rectang wrote: post #92
yosito wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, being dead is terrible for your skin, so.

And anyway, if everyone has the scar we've all got the same tiny deduction in 'attractiveness,' so it cancels out I guess.

Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory

#120

Post by lazide »

foo92691 wrote: post #42
qwertox wrote: post #23

Apparently this happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox > 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…

Deciding to culture the samples, versus just destroying them without analysis, must be accompanied by an interesting risk/benefit analysis.

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?

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