251–260 of 350 posts
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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?
Who knows? But it'd be naive to think that donating billions to global health orgs over the years doesn't buy some sort of access.
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Then a good deal of the population was vaccinated. The US stopped vaccinating for small pox in, I think, 1972... just before I was born.
I was vaccinated. Back then, it was meant to last a lifetime. Not sure that's the case, though.
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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.
Don't we have vaccines? 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.
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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 on…
I don’t know that that number is zero.
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Now just imagine what you could discover cleaning your own freezer
Ok, what the hell is "bigpox"?
Syphilis used to be called "the great pox", which is where smallpox got its name from.
>In the event of an outbreak, the C.D.C. said, “there is enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate every person in the United States.” We'd be lucky to get 80% uptake. I can already imagine all of the anti smallpox vaccine propaganda that would spread through FB within a day.
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.
Perhaps like this upcoming comedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbIxYm3mKzI
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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.
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.
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.…
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Child_with_Smallpox_Bangl...
If that doesn't convince the vaccine hesitant, i dont know what will.
