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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

#261

Post by a2tech »

lazide wrote: post #183
killjoywashere wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 guarantee…

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.

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

#263

Post by redis_mlc »

caseyohara wrote: post #40
macinjosh wrote: post #17

Maybe we should shutdown all labs studying pathogens until they can figure out how to handle themselves. We aren’t even through the current scientist caused pandemic yet.

> We aren’t even through the current scientist caused pandemic yet I'm astonished there are people that think like this on HN

Are you serious?

It's considered more than 50% likely that WIV, a bat corona GoF factory, caused the current pandemic. DOE LLNL reported in May 2020 that it was a possible lab leak.

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

#264

Post by throwawaylinux »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #253
jopsen wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'd maybe buy this comment a few years ago. 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.

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

#265

Post by COGlory »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #253
jopsen wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'd maybe buy this comment a few years ago. 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.

Covid and smallpox are very, very different.

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

#266

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #196

>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.

I have zero interest in taking the COVID "vaccines", but I'd take the smallpox vaccine in a heartbeat if it was coming back.

They're not remotely the same thing. The former drops to less than 50% effectiveness after six months, the latter eradicated the disease.

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

#267

Post by mlac »

Grim-444 wrote: post #123
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.

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 protec…

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.

[1] From the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm#...

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

#268

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

Spooky23 wrote: post #204
jart wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

>Lyme disease is believed to have originated from Plum Island,

Wait, what?!

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

#269

Post by mlac »

stolenmerch wrote: post #225
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…

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.

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

#270

Post by ericmay »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #226
jweir wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The military was still vaccinating in '81, when I joined.

Still vaccinating in select areas. In 2007 deployed to the Republic of Korea and was vaccinated.

It sucked and that was just a baby version…

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