If I were working in a lab I’d think it was hilarious to write “smallpox” on random bottles. Probably good that I work in software and not biology.
I am glad you do not work with me.
Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory
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Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only wild if you assume that everyone has the same likelihood of having proximity to such an event. But people involved in smallpox research have a much increased chance because they have (physical) proximity to the places this can happen and those that find them have (secondary) proximity to those that have higher (physical) proximity. And Gates funds lots of these researchers so he has a very, very high likelihood…
Gates funds a lot of research. Two weeks ago he talked about a smallpox terror attack in the US, and then a couple days ago "smallpox" vials are found. I don't care what his proximity is, it's still a crazy coincidence. And Event 201 was about a global pandemic, put on by the Gates Foundation in October 2019. I don't think I need to point out what happened shortly after that. Again, it's not about proximity but speci…
Consider the possibility that since Smallpox has been eradicated for forty years, someone in that lab may have thought nothing of the vials in there until after seeing the recent chatter about it, triggering a Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon in the lab worker, leading them to reporting the dangerous vials.
Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory
#33A 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. Spoiler alert - nothing good happens to humanity.
EDIT: I appear to have pissed off a lot of people by comparing COVID to the flu. I apologize, I simply meant that COVID is a lot closer to the flu than it is to smallpox. I am vaccinated and wear a mask everywhere, I am not trying to "downplay COVID" or whatever.
Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory
#34Apparently this happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox > On July 1, 2014, six sealed glass vials of smallpox dated 1954, along with sample vials of other pathogens, were discovered in a cold storage room in an FDA laboratory at the National Institutes of Health location in Bethesda, Maryland. The smallpox vials were subsequently transferred to the custody of the CDC in Atlanta, where virus taken from…
More than once.
"The smallpox virus escaped three times from labs in England in the 1960’s and 1970’s, causing 80 cases and 3 deaths."
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory
#35Maybe we should shutdown all labs studying pathogens until they can figure out how to handle themselves. We aren’t even through the current scientist caused pandemic yet.
Maybe we should shut down aws until they figure out how to handle their periodic outages.
An AWS outage doesn't directly cause death. Those aren't comparable at all.
A better comparison would be a nuclear program that can't keep its nuclear materials under proper security. And we can all agree those programs should be avoided.
Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only wild if you assume that everyone has the same likelihood of having proximity to such an event. But people involved in smallpox research have a much increased chance because they have (physical) proximity to the places this can happen and those that find them have (secondary) proximity to those that have higher (physical) proximity. And Gates funds lots of these researchers so he has a very, very high likelihood…
Gates funds a lot of research. Two weeks ago he talked about a smallpox terror attack in the US, and then a couple days ago "smallpox" vials are found. I don't care what his proximity is, it's still a crazy coincidence. And Event 201 was about a global pandemic, put on by the Gates Foundation in October 2019. I don't think I need to point out what happened shortly after that. Again, it's not about proximity but speci…
It's just so silly that people who took the prospect of a global pandemic seriously are looked at suspiciously by conspiracy kooks.
We had so many close calls in the past, including a bunch of Coronaviruses (SARS/MERS/a bunch of serious colds), it was obvious as international travel increased, population density increased and humans further encroached on nature that we would see things like Covid.
Experts had been warning us for years which is why nearly everyone with any brains opposed the idiotic dismantling of warning networks, Chinese CDC teams, and the pandemic response NSC unit under Trump.
Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory
#37> 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.
Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory
#38Huh, 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.
I'm guessing that since that specific job sometimes leads to free foreign travel, it's better to be vaccinated for as many things as possible before deployment happens.
Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory
#39Maybe we should shutdown all labs studying pathogens until they can figure out how to handle themselves. We aren’t even through the current scientist caused pandemic yet.
Good luck getting worldwide cooperation on that. I guess it depends on who you are referring to as `we` but unless it's stopped entirely, there's still real risk of non-compliance leading to leaks or bioterrorism.
Re: Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory
#40Maybe we should shutdown all labs studying pathogens until they can figure out how to handle themselves. We aren’t even through the current scientist caused pandemic yet.
> We aren’t even through the current scientist caused pandemic yet
I'm astonished there are people that think like this on HN