201–210 of 350 posts
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I'm curious what kind of privileged insight could Gates have when he's just a billionaire with no expertise and special clearance in this domain? Or is this such a high likelihood scenario that it's the first thing any billionaire would come up with?
Who knows? But it'd be naive to think that donating billions to global health orgs over the years doesn't buy some sort of access.
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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…
Huh, I got a smallpox vaccine when I was in the military in 2006. I assumed it was still a common thing, but I guess it hasn’t been done for civilians since the 70s? Crazy.
"In July 2018, the Food and Drug Administration approved tecovirimat, the first drug approved for treatment of smallpox" even though "the global eradication of smallpox was certified by the World Health Assembly on 8 May 1980" could a doctor please explain in what universe this makes sense?
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The one where small vials of smallpox are occasionally found abandoned in lab freezers.
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?
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.
https://news.yahoo.com/bill-gates-warns-smallpox-terror-0001... Just like he said about covid.
I'm curious what kind of privileged insight could Gates have when he's just a billionaire with no expertise and special clearance in this domain? Or is this such a high likelihood scenario that it's the first thing any billionaire would come up with?
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Deciding to culture the samples, versus just destroying them without analysis, must be accompanied by an interesting risk/benefit analysis.
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?
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"
>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.
There's a difference between someone coughing through their illness on instagram versus someone covered head to toe with boils. Maybe someone could call it "a somewhat stronger chickenpox" as a method of dismissal, but it'll be difficult.
When we can make Big Bird promoting vaccination a political issue, I expect the amount of people who would reject a smallpox vaccine would be disturbingly high.
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I understand why HN doesn't like speculation in "dirty" topics. But I wouldn't really blame the average person for wondering about this since we know that Gates & WEF held coronavirus pandemic drills a month before the outbreak happened (or by some accounts of the origins, in the same month as it happened). I think everyone's suspicions of government and individuals tied to it are extra high due to everything from th…
It's because Gates has been shouting from the rooftops about the danger of pandemics exactly like ours for years and years but was mostly ignored. Of course his org was continuing to do work related to preparing society for what they thought (and we now know) was inevitable.
Dates of earliest cases in Wuhan: October 2019 (September by some counts)
Sorry, they knew about the outbreak or you're talking astronomical odds, yet they pretended they didn't know about it yet. This is why he's lost face (other than his association with JE)
> The frozen vials "were incidentally discovered by a laboratory worker while cleaning out a freezer in a facility that conducts vaccine research in Pennsylvania" Occam's razor suggests that those were put into the freezer decades ago and forgotten, and if they were moved, no one bothered to read the labels until now.
Yeah, I agree. But Occam’s razor rarely makes a good enough story…
>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.