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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

#311

Post by crate_barre »

wutbrodo wrote: post #290
mynameisvlad wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 evid…

Shows how vain society is. If COVID was a harmless and flu-like, but causes a permanent mole on your nose, then I can promise you everyone would get the vaccine.

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

#312

Post by tibbydudeza »

krisoft wrote: post #206
lazide wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> If some gov’t lab deep in Siberia has some samples That's not an if. We know that the Vector Institute has smallpox samples and they are headquartered in Siberia. let's use this source maybe: https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/vector-institute-in-nov... or maybe this one: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/17/blast-sparks-f... It's really not a secret, and definitely not an "if"

It is also pretty secure place and there is a detachment of the Russian Army nearby just in case.

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

#313

Post by native_samples »

lazide wrote: post #164
timr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Smallpox is significantly less infectious, and generally requires close and extended contact with a person who is coughing and infectious or a surface recently contaminated by someone with open sores. I don't know where you're getting your numbers. Current estimates for smallpox R0 are all over the place (as are the Covid ones, but I digress) and run from 1-20, with contemporary numbers as high as 6: https://pubmed…

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…

R0 unfortunately turns out to be a basically meaningless number for COVID. In theory it is a natural property of the virus. Other measures of R like Rt are then the 'adjusted' rates that take into account environmental factors.

In reality none of these numbers have any scientific validity, as they are usually computed using methodologies that aren't valid. In particular R0 is often simply a free variable in a model, i.e. a fudge factor in which the values are brute forced until the model output comes into line with reported government statistics. What does this fudge factor represent, if anything? Nobody actually knows, so it gets labelled R and then announced as a "fact" by epidemiologists. But then someone else takes a slightly different data set and runs the same calculation, but with a totally different R0 value coming out the other end.

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

#314

Post by eunos »

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.…

With anti vaxx arguably has more influence and voice due to social media, that'd be disaster.

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

#315

Post by tzs »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #264
mynameisvlad wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 revise…

> 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.

But what about when how they value things is not rational?

Consider for example people who are rejecting COVID vaccines because they believe that they contain luciferase (they don't, BTW, although luciferases were likely used in the development of the vaccines). Why, you might wonder, would someone care about whether or not the vaccines contained bioluminescent enzymes?

I've seen two reasons. (1) somehow the bioluminescent enzymes are supposed to make it so the government can track you, and (2) the name comes from the word "lucifer" when clearly means that the vaccine is the work of or promotes Satan.

If someone truly believes either of those things then arguably it is rational for them to decide that the risks of the vaccine outweigh the benefits, but nevertheless I would not call their overall behavior rational.

Quite a few of the reasons for rejecting COVID vaccination given by people who end up as the subjects of /r/HermanCainAward or /r/CovidAteMyFace posts would apply just as well to smallpox vaccination, and quite a few of those people are in high risk COVID groups or situations.

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

#316

Post by dTal »

a2tech wrote: post #261
lazide wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For months, almost the entire Western world just watched slackjawed while Covid spread outward from China - presumably hoping it would just go away.

I wouldn't worry too much about hamstringing containment efforts.

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

#317

Post by dTal »

timr wrote: post #83
lazide wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smallpox is significantly less infectious, and generally requires close and extended contact with a person who is coughing and infectious or a surface recently contaminated by someone with open sores. Original variant was about half as infectious as measles (the most infectious known human disease), and some of the many of the new Covid variants are very very close (about 80%) as infectious as measles. Difference bet…

> Smallpox is significantly less infectious, and generally requires close and extended contact with a person who is coughing and infectious or a surface recently contaminated by someone with open sores. I don't know where you're getting your numbers. Current estimates for smallpox R0 are all over the place (as are the Covid ones, but I digress) and run from 1-20, with contemporary numbers as high as 6: https://pubmed…

> you walk by a group of people in the park and they’re infected >This has never been documented in the entire history of SARS-CoV2

This seems like something at risk of being a self fulfilling prophecy. How would something like that be documented? You can't do contact tracing on random people you walk past in the park. Even the contact tracing apps, sparsely used as they are, generally require a 15 minute contact period to "count". We've assumed that it can't happen, but we have no way of knowing if it did happen.

(Anecdata, accompany with 0.36g sodium chloride: I was speaking to someone over the weekend who claims they can pinpoint to a 20-minute window when they got infected (on the basis that they could not have caught it from anyone else that day) and they reckon that they got it from walking down an extremely densely crowded alleyway. Due to a testing screwup, this person isn't even documented as having had Covid at all. Of course, they may be mistaken, but nevertheless it goes to show that just because something happened, doesn't mean it will be recorded.)

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

#318

Post by dahfizz »

This comes right after the FDA approves a new small pox drug[1] and bill gates warns about a small pox "terror attack"[2]. Suspicious....

[1] https://www.fda.gov/drugs/news-events-human-drugs/fda-approv...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/bill-gates-smallp...

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

#319

Post by mrep »

bluGill wrote: post #152
paxys wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

"The Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) has stockpiled enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate every person in the United States." [0]

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/bioterrorism-response-planning/...

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

#320

Post by mrep »

bee_rider wrote: post #101
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

Given that widespread vaccination for smallpox stopped in the 70's, I guess responding to a large outbreak would be a big problem. I'd hope we've got lots of smallpox vaccine stockpiled, though.

We have enough stockpiled to vaccinate every single person in the US [0].

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/bioterrorism-response-planning/...

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