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It's unfortunate that all of this got politicized, but the fact is that nobody knows for sure where it came from nor does anyone know for sure where it didn't come from. I would say it's not a waste of time to review what labs are doing all over the world since the stakes are so high.
Everything in modern society is scientist-caused if you go deep enough.
It’s also possible there is viable smallpox frozen in permafrost which is increasingly thawing recently. It would take an unlikely chain of events for it to reestablish itself from that starting point, but it’s possible.
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Don't we have vaccines? I mean sure an outbreak would be pretty horrific. But once the pictures start circulating, I suspect vaccine hesitation would evaporate pretty quickly. Yes, yes, we should go far to avoid an outbreak, but would it really be so world ending? Wouldn't we just contain it, vaccinate widely and be done with it?
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.
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Given the risk of myocarditis and other things against the low risk of my demographic with COVID, I'd rather not take the drug with no long term studies.
Regarding myocarditis from the Moderna vaccine: "For instance, Israel reported So that's a 0.003% and 0.0008% rate, respectively. And you have a 0.15% chance of getting myocarditis from COVID-19 itself. https://www.news-medical.net/news/20211116/Myocarditis-among... https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm
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I thought that too. But then I use vintage lab glassware labeled Hydrochloric Acid and Potassium Hydroxide for oil & vinegar containers.
Let's hope nobody has a similar sense of humor and replaces the contents with that which it says on the label.
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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…
The scarier thought is some kind of gene-targeted virus that avoids the blowback
The incentives that support this type of research will be (or are) too high to ignore.
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I'm having trouble getting good stats on it, but it looks like there were a handful of deaths -- maybe, single or low double digits -- that could be directly attributed to the COVID vaccine. The smallpox vaccine, if we had to vaccinate the whole country, could cause some deaths too. This pretty old paper estimates somewhere ~200, I've seen an estimate elsewhere of around ~500, can't get a good source on the second on…
How many deaths would we expect from the injection of a billion “doses” of injected saline solution? I don’t know that that number is zero.
These vaccines do of course have some (rare! and way less bad than getting sick!) side effects. So I'd suspect a saline shot to be less dangerous. But that's a guess.
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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.
Smallpox is actually dangerous, and the smallpox vaccine is like 200 years old. Not even 1% of people would refuse that vaccine in that scenario.
Especially if it happened right now with all the controversy around the Covid vaccine, it'd surely be spun as the Covid vaccine in disguise, or the government forcing its way into tracking us all with nanotechnology.
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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…
Given that, regardless of the actual risk or visceral evidence provided, almost anything can be spun as a positive or negative with enough determination, and on the heels of a major anti-vax campaign with Covid, there would be sure to be major overlap between the two were a smallpox outbreak to occur right now.
The first vaccine hesitancy campaign literally was against the smallpox vaccine in Stockholm, so I don't see how you could say that there would be no hesitancy to it. History has already shown that to not be the case over and over again.
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Let's hope nobody has a similar sense of humor and replaces the contents with that which it says on the label.
Yeah that would be unfortunate if someone ordered dangerous chemicals, snuck them into your kitchen, and furtively replaced the contents of bottles in your pantry with those chemicals. If only you didn't use those joke labels. What are you even saying?