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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

#111

Post by DangitBobby »

epistasis wrote: post #42
jfengel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it comes at a time when a disease we were working on eliminating, measles, has come back and the US is about to lose its measles-free status. It sounds as if his legacy is to be unique, a feat never to be accomplished again.

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…

How does a public that derives its knowledge from authority (For example, how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat and orbits the sun? Would they be able to reach those conclusions if school books taught something else?) stand a chance at resisting misinformation spread by trusted authorities?

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#112

Post by aleph_minus_one »

DangitBobby wrote: post #111
epistasis wrote: post #42

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…

How does a public that derives its knowledge from authority (For example, how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat and orbits the sun? Would they be able to reach those conclusions if school books taught something else?) stand a chance at resisting misinformation spread by trusted authorities?

> how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat and orbits the sun?

Pun intended?

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#113

Post by somenameforme »

epistasis wrote: post #42
jfengel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it comes at a time when a disease we were working on eliminating, measles, has come back and the US is about to lose its measles-free status. It sounds as if his legacy is to be unique, a feat never to be accomplished again.

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…

People can simply have different perspectives on things. Measels has mortality rate of around 0.1% while small pox has a mortality rate of around 30%. So the individual risk from measels is relatively low leaving plenty of room for individual choice.

There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox, which led to the discovery that infection with cow pox (which is relatively harmless) provided immunity to small pox - hence 'vacca cine', vacca = cow in latin.

But there's a long history of people trying to self vaccinate with all sorts of things against small pox including using scrapings off somebody's small pox wounds to hopefully give oneself a light infection. Needless to say that came with well understood side effects up to and including full-on small pox infection. But when the death rate is 30%, people were willing to do some crazy things, because the risk:reward was seen as worth it.

---

FWIW I did ultimately decide to vaccinate my children against measels, but it was not an easy decision, because it is in general not that risky a disease whose mortality rate had already precipitously declined (from 13 per 100k to 0.19 per 100k) [1] before a vaccine was first introduced in 1963. Obviously I think it's the right decision, but I also wouldn't really fault anybody for going the other direction either.

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death-r...

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#114

Post by andrewflnr »

lmz wrote: post #79
deadbabe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genghis Khan??

Genghis Khan also not too bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica Whose peace are we now living under and what atrocities did they commit to establish it?

I think this is a rationalization. Humans are always tempted to look up to power, and what's more powerful than an empire? It goes unquestioned that we should respect the Roman empire, for instance, and you pretty often see an argument for the Mongolian empire. But these days, we know that violence is bad so we have to find other reasons to justify our feelings. So we talk about the "peace" they established after all the war. But is the cost really worth it? How many people not attacked by bandits do you need to justify an innocent murdered by raiding soldiers? Never mind that even the "peace" is often sustained through oppression. The Romans didn't invent crucifixion for Jesus, it's something they did. Never mind that the empire never lasts, and plants seeds of the next dozen wars as it falls, watered with yet more blood.

Ask yourself: if you honestly intended to create peace, would a century or more (in the case of Rome) of bloody conquest actually be the optimal plan? I would say no. An actual plan for peace through strength looks more like NATO than Rome.

Any good an empire builder does is accidental. Whatever they tell you or even themselves, they do it for glory and power, and their actions are optimized for that over any actual benefits. They were not nobler than the conquerors and colonizers were rightfully decry today.

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#115

Post by webdoodle »

IshKebab wrote: post #101
webdoodle wrote: post #44

Except it wasn't eradicated. It's still stored at the US's Fort Detrick, and in Russian and Chinese bioweapons facilities, too be released as a bioweapon, now that no one has natural immunity anymore.

It would be a pretty shoddy bioweapon considering you can't really target it and vaccines are available. Maybe Russia or China are funding anti-vax idiots in the US so that it only affects America :-D

Most people aren't vaccinated for smallpox, and only a very small amount of vaccine is even produced, mostly for medical and military people. Targetting is easy, here's your blanket while the power is out...

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#116

Post by atoav »

belorn wrote: post #66
ccppurcell wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be a war crime...

Given the period of 2010-2012, the president at the time was Barack Obama. It does not seem realistic that people would accept opening a criminal case.

I would accept it if it even if it was done by Ghandi.

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#117

Post by jfengel »

somenameforme wrote: post #113
epistasis wrote: post #42

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…

People can simply have different perspectives on things. Measels has mortality rate of around 0.1% while small pox has a mortality rate of around 30%. So the individual risk from measels is relatively low leaving plenty of room for individual choice. There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox…

I think that if people observed what a 1 in 1,000 chance of a dead child looked like, they'd have a much easier time making the decision.

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#118

Post by gosub100 »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #43
quesera wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still have another chance for eradication in humans with Polio.

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…

Why would this cause everyone in the area to not vaccinate, and not just limited to parents who are on a most-wanted list?

What made me disappointed about this was that they revealed how they did it, and they didn't rescue the doctor who helped them pull it off.

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#119

Post by somenameforme »

jfengel wrote: post #117
somenameforme wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can simply have different perspectives on things. Measels has mortality rate of around 0.1% while small pox has a mortality rate of around 30%. So the individual risk from measels is relatively low leaving plenty of room for individual choice. There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox…

I think that if people observed what a 1 in 1,000 chance of a dead child looked like, they'd have a much easier time making the decision.

A friend's favorite Wiki page is on the micromort. [1] I found it kind of banal, but perhaps that's my more casual attitude towards death. I suspect the average person doesn't realize, or doesn't accept, how brief life truly is. One micromort is something with a 1 in a million chance of death. So with measels, we're talking about 1000 micromorts, if you're infected - which is also extremely unlikely. So if you give yourself a 1% chance of ever being infected with measels (which would be quite high) then not vaccinating would be down to a 1% * 1000 = 10 micromorts of risk.

All non-natural cause of death in the US, excluding suicide, is about 1.3 micromorts per day. So it's the same all non-natural cause risk you'll be exposed to over the next week. The page offers a lot of other comparables - traveling 100 miles by biking, 2500 by car, or 10k by airplane, and so on.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

Re: Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

#120

Post by adastra22 »

Y-bar wrote: post #105
Metacelsus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Harold Shipman Saved the lives of thousands Probably not though, I don't think a typical GP saves thousands of lives

Not alone, but as a team I bet he did. Just as Fritz Haber did not personally save countless millions with his discovery, thousands of other people had to be involved there as well.

Billions. The total carrying capacity of the Earth maxes out at 4bn people, even with maximally optimized agriculture and a vegetarian diet. The extra half of the Earth's population today owe their existence to Haber-Bosch.

It really was a two-man team that discovered nitrogen fixation - the other being not Carl Bosch, but Robert Le Rossignol who assisted Haber in developing his bench-scale nitrogen fixing reactor. Carl Bosch led the team that scaled it up, and that was a large effort of hundreds of people.

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