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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

#121

Post by gfodor »

schrodinger wrote: post #89
kupiakos wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

You’re right. People are triggered by the comparison.

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #98
dekhn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You have to do a little more than touch ether to set it off.

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by Grim-444 »

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.

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.

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

#124

Post by jimbob45 »

jjulius wrote: post #104
jimbob45 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29269142 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.

Couple of things to clarify here: - 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),…

>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.

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

#125

Post by himinlomax »

gfodor wrote: post #118
bastardoperator wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The flu also kills mostly the elderly and sick. In fact I get the impression that it does so more than Covid does.

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

#126

Post by wolfgang42 »

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.

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

#127

Post by marcosdumay »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #82
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…

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. [1] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com

Well, SCP would refer to the cultivation media by name.

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

#128

Post by goda90 »

jart wrote: post #59
pram wrote: post #27

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?

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.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecovirimat

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

#129

Post by joe-collins »

jart wrote: post #59
pram wrote: post #27

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.

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

#130

Post by krotton »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #57
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.

>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 situa…

Well, you're dangerously wrong in simply assuming it's not smallpox, having zero evidence for your thesis.
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