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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

#281

Post by u801e »

max-ibel wrote: post #88
jayflux wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A smallpox pandemic would be orders of magnitude more deadly than COVID Edit: fair enough there’s no vaccinations for smallpox anymore. But countries do still buy stockpiles

No they don't, at least in the US. Older people may still be vaccinated in their youth (I guess when born before 1980s).

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.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/vaccine-basics/index.html

[2] https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/vaccine-education-cent...

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

#282

Post by ajvs »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #219
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.

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.

It's actually within 30 days according to WHO guidelines, so more than twice the duration.

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

#283

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

icedchai wrote: post #276
NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you'd rather have no effectiveness by not getting the vaccine at all?

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.

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

#284

Post by stolenmerch »

mlac wrote: post #269
stolenmerch wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (wher…

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.

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

#285

Post by edot »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #283
icedchai wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you'd rather have no effectiveness by not getting the vaccine at all?

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 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.

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20211116/Myocarditis-among...

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm

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

#287

Post by philipkglass »

duskwuff wrote: post #232
Gibbon1 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my high school they found a 40 year old bottle of picric acid. Came with the original lab stock in 1960

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picric_acid#History

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":

https://unece.org/DAM/trans/danger/publi/manual/Rev5/English...

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

#288

Post by lazide »

timr wrote: post #217
lazide wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, your data is well out of date. 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. Measured R0 in New York for COVID was 6.4 [ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.11…

> Ah, your data is well out of date. 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…

It’s not an estimate in NYC - that was measured.

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

#289

Post by arn »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #266
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.

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

Would you only take the first Smallpox vaccine, or would you get the booster every 3 years?

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/smallpox/index.html

Adverse reactions (including myocarditis): https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/vaccine-basics/vaccination-effe...

It also eradicated small pox since the vaccine was mandated.

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

#290

Post by wutbrodo »

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.

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.

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