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Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#81
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He killed millions. He fed billions.

Epstein was friendly with, and made more people smile, than he raped. Phil Spector produced music which meant a lot to a lot of people. Still a murderer. Harold Shipman Saved the lives of thousands, yet should always be labelled a mass murderer because he knowingly positioned hundreds.

>Harold Shipman Saved the lives of thousands

Probably not though, I don't think a typical GP saves thousands of lives

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#82
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm overly an optimist, but I have a feeling we will develop the informational and psychological technology to combat the destructive misinformation campaigns that brainwash people into harming their children with anti-vaccine beliefs. We are not there yet, because the destructive media forces are too new and we haven't developed defenses against information diseases like RFK Jr. But we will get there. Two st…

As a non-American I don't care what you do, if you want to behave like irresponsible idiots without any regard for the lives of others you have that right. Just don't subject vulnerable individuals in other countries to your own bad choices (you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful). Maybe visitors from the United States should have to present vaccine certificates at airports or be quar…

Canada and the UK have a ton more measles than even the US's completely unacceptable level of measles.

Thinning this is a US problem completely misunderstands the nature of the misinformation problem.

And I hope there's vaccination requirements for travel, according to how public health officials determine threats.

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politicians and empire-builders (Elon) is currently standing in the way of human progress and history.

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Elon Musk is promoting progress only when he has something to gain from it (in economical terms or in terms of his image), but has no qualms wrecking progress, butchering indiscriminately and hurting prople when it comes to his personal grievances. This is further aggravated by his mercurial and egomaniacal personality, and the false reality build on conspiracies he surrounds himself in.

Hapazardly and chaotically dismantling the US public sector on some ideological crusade was not advancing human progress. Netiher was turning Twitter into some farcical shell of its former self, owned by Saudi Arabia. Neither was sabotaging projects such as high-speed rail systems purely out of spite.

> Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system. … At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.

Any good he has produced along the way (that mitigates the damage he is causing) is only a means to an end for him, and he would have no hesitations burning it all to the ground the moment it suites him. If everyone acted like him humanity would be doomed, not quickly progressing toward some technological utopia.

Or, as his acquaintance Sam Altman put it: "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it."

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#84
post #41

I'm starting to think that we should be calling it "contained", not "eradicated". Eradication invites the question "Well then, why do we still need the vaccine?"

It really is eradicated - it's the only human disease we've truly eradicated. There are literally no more cases of smallpox in the wild, period. The problem is that there are samples of viable virus in the labs of the US and Russia. So - it's eradicated but we have to keep stockpiles of vaccine around anyway. But nobody gets vaccined for it any more; it has an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio when the virus simply does…

Actually, do we need to keep samples anymore?

mRNA vaccines go from sequenced DNA to vaccine without any need to store or culture the original virus in the lab.

We could destroy our existing stockpile of smallpox and be ready to produce vaccines based on it faster than we could thirty years ago.

We couldn't validate new vaccines without access to the live virus, but then, if we aren't willing to expose hopefully-volunteers to a disease with a 30% mortality rate, we weren't really validating it anyway.

But yeah, I think we could probably unilaterally "disarm" and destroy our smallpox samples, and from a national security standpoint, I don't think we'd be significantly worse off; if the weaponized strain is significantly different from the old strain, enough to bypass vaccination, we'd need samples of the new thing in any case.

I'm not even sure we'd be substantially limiting new research on it, given that smallpox doesn't infect animals, I'm not sure if there's even any animal testing we could do with a live virus.

So yeah. Destroy the samples already.

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politicians and empire-builders (Elon) is currently standing in the way of human progress and history.

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I must have forgotten that Elon actually is the original founder of Tesla and not a phony. At best he's their money guy.

Do you think Elon knows a single thing about rockets? Do you actually think he has literally anything to do with them? He isn't even capable of forming a sentence without stuttering, much less actually doing literally anything at all. Keep defending your pedophiles, bro. I'm sure in 10 years you'll be glad we have a written record of your stance.

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#86
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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It's not what his businesses are doing, it is what he says and what he spreads to a tech bro disciple that spreads this shit far away, working with technologies like AI at the forefront, ending up setting us back in our progress & history. Same applies to Thiel, Zuckerberg and whoever not. Read up on Thiel & Trump, then come back.

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Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if the CIA has anything to say about it: CIA fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan[0] ...The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden. It led to the arrest of a participating physician, Shakil Afridi, and was widely ridiculed as undermining public health.[2][3] The program is credited with increasing vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan[4][5][6][7] and a rise in violence against healthcare workers…

This should be a war crime...

International law does not apply to the leaders of the western hegemony. It is merely a tool used to oppress poor nations even further.

This fact only further proves one thing: the CIA is a terrorist organization and the state behind it is responsible for some of the most disgusting things this planet has ever seen.

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#88
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not what his businesses are doing, it is what he says and what he spreads to a tech bro disciple that spreads this shit far away, working with technologies like AI at the forefront, ending up setting us back in our progress & history. Same applies to Thiel, Zuckerberg and whoever not. Read up on Thiel & Trump, then come back.

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