[HN Gopher] Vials labeled 'smallpox' are found in Pennsylvania l...
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Vials labeled 'smallpox' are found in Pennsylvania laboratory
Author : gumby
Score : 151 points
Date : 2021-11-18 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Reminder that accidental releases of deadly viruses have happened
| before. For example consider this event, sometimes known as the
| "biological Chernobyl":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
| kolanos wrote:
| There was a recent case of imported monkey pox in Maryland. [0]
|
| [0]: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s1117-monkeypox.html
| macinjosh wrote:
| Maybe 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.
| pm90 wrote:
| Maybe we should shut down aws until they figure out how to
| handle their periodic outages.
| beachwood23 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jjulius wrote:
| >We aren't even through the current pandemic yet.
|
| FTFY.
| codezero wrote:
| 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.
| caseyohara wrote:
| > We aren't even through the current scientist caused pandemic
| yet
|
| I'm astonished there are people that think like this on HN
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| Seems significantly more likely than not this current
| pandemic originated via a lab leak. Although the comment
| makes it sound like it was on purpose, rather than an
| accident which again seems most likely.
| jjulius wrote:
| Sorta. To your point, it hasn't been proven that it's a lab
| leak, though evidence has shifted toward that direction. My
| issue with OP's comment is that he stated it was a lab leak
| with absolute certainty.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29269142
|
| Over in the other thread, we're discussing Kasparov admitting
| that China definitely covered up evidence from their Wuhan
| lab regardless of whether or not they were actually
| responsible for a leak.
| jjulius wrote:
| Couple of things to clarify here:
|
| - In that article, Kasparov only says that the Trump
| administration said that, and then he discusses the
| discourse around that claim in 2020. He _does not_ "[admit]
| that China definitely covered up evidence from their Wuhan
| lab" or anything like that. _EDIT: I stand corrected on
| this point._
|
| - Nobody in that thread has actually yet mentioned that
| COVID claim (at the time of my comment), they're all
| sticking to what Kasparov's piece is about, which is mob
| mentality and group think.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| >Invaluable months were lost, time the Chinese Communist
| Party used to destroy data and spread disinformation
| about the virus's origins. We may never know the truth,
| but we do know there was a coverup.
|
| Maybe we're just interpreting the above statement in two
| different ways.
| jjulius wrote:
| I stand corrected on that point and will edit my post
| accordingly, but there's still absolutely zero discussion
| about that point in that thread. You even said, " _we
| 're_ discussing" but you haven't even commented there
| yourself.
| clavalle wrote:
| 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.
| kupiakos wrote:
| Everything in modern society is scientist-caused if you go
| deep enough.
| hh3k0 wrote:
| I'd be d'accord if he said something to the effect of:
|
| > We aren't even through the current possibly scientist-
| caused pandemic yet
|
| Peter Daszak should have to testify before Congress, imo.
| [deleted]
| trhway wrote:
| >I'm astonished there are people that think like this on HN
|
| you're just probably not aware that Daszak's Wuhan corona
| virus gain-of-function program included human testing. It is
| actually specified in the clear on his EcoAlliance NIH Wuhan
| 2014 grant form .
| api wrote:
| They belong in an autoclave.
| tonyhb wrote:
| They really, really do.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Related: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/bill-gates-
| smallp...
|
| edit: Wow downvotes for linking to an event related to small pox.
| I figured it was important especially the timing. How many other
| small pox events do you remember in recent history?
|
| It's simply an interview about smallpox that happened recently.
| All I said was it was related.
| mullingitover wrote:
| This is not a good topic for Hacker News, you might get a
| better reception on Infowars.
| qwertox wrote:
| Considering the context of the topic and the current state of
| the world, I found it to be an interesting read.
| jameslk wrote:
| > you might get a better reception on Infowars
|
| Can you elaborate why you added this part to your comment?
| 0des wrote:
| I interpreted it as a signal of derision.
| mullingitover wrote:
| The parent comment was a pretty clumsy dog whistle to
| paranoid folks who believe Gates to be a sinister
| puppetmaster who is unleashing pandemic disease on the
| world. The Infowars audience is very receptive to this
| unfounded notion. Since the commenter is concerned about
| the popularity of his posts, I proposed a suitable audience
| that would be more receptive and would provide the desired
| positive response.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| When labeling commentary as a dog whistle, one needs to
| be mindful of the possibility they have tinnitus related
| to said issue.
| capableweb wrote:
| You seem to be the conspirator here, the linked article
| from hunterb123 makes no claims about Bill Gates (as a
| puppetmaster or anything else) but simply quotes what he
| has been saying at some event.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Did you just see the words "Bill Gates" and jump to your
| own conclusions, then call out the parent poster based on
| your jumped-to conclusions?
|
| The article is posted on a mainstream site and describes
| how Bill wants additional funding to research
| preventative measures against future pandemics. What is
| the dog whistle? Where is the sinister puppetmaster
| references? Where does it say Bill Gates is unleashing a
| pandemic?
| mullingitover wrote:
| > What is the dog whistle?
|
| The original article has nothing to do with Bill Gates,
| but the commenter in this thread posted this wholly
| unrelated article, pronouncing it "Related", without any
| other comment to explain the context of the linked
| article or how it relates to the original story. You need
| look no further than the other (also heavily downvoted)
| commenters in this thread to see who heard the dog
| whistle loud and clear.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Where does the puppet master/unleashing pandemic stuff
| come into play?
|
| The article of Bill Gates talking preventative measures
| against future pandemics (including smallpox, which funny
| enough is related to smallpox vials), has literally 0
| conspiracy-related things in it. How can that even be a
| dogwhistle?
|
| If you post a story about cancer, and I post a semi-
| related story of Bill talking about cancer prevention, am
| I also dog-whistling? Is anything that has Bill in it now
| a dog whistle?
|
| Edit to add: The linked artile even has smallpox in the
| title. How you can say it is "wholly" unrelated is
| baffling.
| [deleted]
| jameslk wrote:
| It seems like you've been on HN long enough to know the
| guidelines so I won't parrot them. I think these type of
| "assuming worst intent" type of comments don't help the
| community honestly, they just piss people off more and
| further polarization. I believe it would have been better
| had you simply left off the "Infowars" part of your
| comment.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| In the GP's defense, it is not like they posted this article
| completely out of the blue and on some unrelated topic.
|
| I find it to be an intriguing coincidence that a vial labeled
| "smallpox" happened to be discovered around the time that
| "Bill Gates has warned governments to prepare for smallpox
| terror attacks and future pandemics by investing billions
| into research and development." It is either a dumb-luck
| coincidence or some remarkable prescience from Bill Gates.
| Either way, the article makes no claims on the topic.
|
| No, I don't think this is the beginning of some grand
| conspiracy. Besides, it is completely within the realm of
| possibility that a virulent disease like Smallpox could be
| accidentally or maliciously re-introduced to the world. I see
| no harm in what the GP posted.
| [deleted]
| poorjohnmacafee wrote:
| 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
| the last 2 years.
| zaptrem wrote:
| 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.
| poorjohnmacafee wrote:
| WEF/Gates simulation event on pandemic: mid October 2019
|
| 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)
| pkukkapalli wrote:
| "Battling misinformation" these days is more about conditioning
| people to practice crimestop it seems. Thanks for posting, I
| hadn't seen this before, and it's definitely interesting
| jaywalk wrote:
| What a coincidence. Another coincidence would be Event 201:
| https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/
|
| Even one of those coincidences would be pretty amazing, but
| two? Tied to the same person? Absolutely wild.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| Huh? Bill Gates is looking to the future and imagining the
| shit storms we're not prepared for, not sure what you're
| trying to say...
| PLenz wrote:
| 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 of
| being withing a few steps of relation to something like this.
| Think centrality from graph theory. Gates is a very central
| vertex.
| jaywalk wrote:
| 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 specificity and timing.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Oh fuck off. Really. Enough of this bullshit.
| [deleted]
| codezero wrote:
| 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.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| 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.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Absolutely sickening that this guy was worshiped as a COVID-19
| expert in liberal media. Bill Gates was pretty close to Epstein
| as well, who was obsessed with eugenics.
| 323 wrote:
| The sequence of the smallpox virus is publicly available:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/9627521
|
| What sort of labs have the skills to reverse genetics it into a
| cowpox backbone?
|
| Are we talking 2-3 labs in the world, or basically any decent
| lab? Could a PhD in virology/microbiology do it?
| koeng wrote:
| It doesn't take that much. If you're good enough at DNA build
| from oligos, could probably synthesize it with less than a PhD.
| It is expensive though, and very unlikely that anyone would
| actually do it in a way that evades the surveillance systems.
| londons_explore wrote:
| How much harder is it than the process of building your own
| bacteria from a DNA sequence...? Would just tacking it into a
| bacterial DNA sequence and being lucky end up in replication
| of it?
|
| I remember when I looked into it that about $5k of equipment
| scrounged from ebay and stuff being trashed from labs was
| probably enough for making your own bacteria.
| 323 wrote:
| But I think the hard part is not just synthesizing the DNA,
| but instead assembling the various proteins into an actual
| virus.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| sneeeeeed wrote:
| Just a week after Bill Gates warned us? What are the odds?
| telesilla wrote:
| Is this a good time to move to a dairy farm?
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Humor absolutely will not be tolerated!!!
| qwertox wrote:
| Apparently 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 at least two vials proved viable in
| culture.[130][131] After studies were conducted, the CDC
| destroyed the virus under WHO observation on February 24,
| 2015.[132]
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Tangentially, I've been on an SCP [1] binge lately, and it's
| interesting to see the cues SCP takes from the real world. Your
| quote could be taken verbatim from one of their stories.
|
| [1] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, SCP would refer to the cultivation media by name.
| bitwize wrote:
| I'm sure a FOIA request will reveal heavily redacted
| containment procedures for those vials that look straight out
| of the Foundation, as well :)
| chasil wrote:
| 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...
| jweir wrote:
| Then a good deal of the population was vaccinated. The US
| stopped vaccinating for small pox in, I think, 1972... just
| before I was born.
| [deleted]
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I was vaccinated. Back then, it was meant to last a
| lifetime. Not sure that's the case, though.
| prox wrote:
| There was an interesting discussion in r/labrats about
| hoarding old stuff in labs. Can definitely see it happen.
| foo92691 wrote:
| Deciding to culture the samples, versus just destroying them
| without analysis, must be accompanied by an interesting
| risk/benefit analysis.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Honestly I am more concerned with the transport. If I had
| found the samples I would consider burning down the lab.
|
| Sorry, but the end of Smallpox is one of the greatest medical
| success stories ever. I am not going to be the one who
| reopens that particular Pandoras box.
| [deleted]
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| They were transported to the existing, single approved
| location for processing these samples before being cultured.
| So the risk may not have been any more than existing research
| at that facility.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I was always under the impressions, that they keep the
| samples frozen in some big "freezer", and that they don't
| poke them around and "play" with them... so opening an
| unknown vial of an unknown sample of possibly smallpox,
| having the sample analyzed, and all the procedures needed
| for that, seem (to me) more risky than just keeping the
| freezer running.
| lazide wrote:
| 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?
| killjoywashere wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| 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 guaranteed, but so far seems to be panning
| out. Let's hope it stays that way.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| The scarier thought is some kind of gene-targeted virus
| that avoids the blowback
| krisoft wrote:
| > If some gov't lab deep in Siberia has some samples
|
| 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"
| 14 wrote:
| As I mentioned this years ago here I once found microscope slides
| in my grandpa basement labeled small pox. He was a doctor/
| scientist. Everyone said that the slides would contain inactive
| virus that were of no threat. I've long gotten rid of them
| because I haven't owned a microscope in ages and with the
| internet can always look up small pox there.
| programmarchy wrote:
| You can see smallpox with a microscope? I thought viruses were
| too small to be seen except by electron microscopes.
| 14 wrote:
| Good question. I never tried to look at them under the
| microscope so I have no clue what they showed. But I have no
| doubt there was a slide of small pox since after my grandpa
| died we found all sorts of weird shit in his basement. Big
| jar of mercury, giant moths, frogs, strange bugs in jars of
| formaldehyde and some even weirder shit.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Outside of an electron microscope not really, they are in the
| femtometer range.
| natch wrote:
| 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.
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| A passing mention in the middle of the article caught my eye:
|
| _> a total of "15 questionable vials" with five labeled as
| "smallpox" and 10 as "vaccinia."_
|
| Had I misremembered the etymology of "vaccine"? Was this a typo?
| Turns out to be an interesting story
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccinia); TLDR, the actual
| origins of the smallpox vaccine are surprisingly murky (due to a
| lack of early record-keeping), so when scientists discovered that
| the virus they were using to make it was actually a separate,
| otherwise unknown species they used the name that Jenner had
| originally applied to the cowpox he used for his early
| vaccinations.
| gnat wrote:
| https://archive.md/T0FyB
| miked85 wrote:
| > _There is no indication that anyone has been exposed to the
| small number of frozen vials._
|
| Well that is comforting, as long as it was a small number of
| vials, it is safe.
| pram wrote:
| 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.
| jart wrote:
| "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?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| The one where small vials of smallpox are occasionally found
| abandoned in lab freezers.
| jart wrote:
| 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?
| bluGill wrote:
| The rarer the disease the easier it is to get approved.
| Once approved you can tell doctors can use it for
| anything, and you can tell doctors what else it "might"
| work for. Doctors can then buy it for those other things,
| which they might do. You are supposed to study the other
| things, but that takes time and a lot more money (to be
| kind)
|
| Note, the above is an over simplification, good enough
| for discussion, but not for any other use. Those who the
| above is useful information for already know many finer
| details of the above, and how it varies from country to
| country.
| jart wrote:
| That's quite a regulatory hack. Thanks for explaining it
| to me.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Because it is a disease which has been weaponized by the
| United States, United Kingdom and former Soviet Union at
| a minimum.
|
| 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.
| zaptrem wrote:
| There is still the fear of accidental outbreaks from
| situations like OP, or biowarfare.
| jccooper wrote:
| The world in which smallpox is a potential weapon. Part of
| the research was done by the Army. It is also effective
| against other pox viruses.
| goda90 wrote:
| I'm not a doctor, but from the looks of the wiki[0], it can
| be used for other viruses in the pox family. Also, smallpox
| is considered a major threat for bio-warfare, as multiple
| nations have it in deep storage. That's why the military is
| still vaccinated against it.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecovirimat
| joe-collins wrote:
| Smallpox is still retained in government labs in the US and
| Russia, and its genetic information is available and could
| allow for its synthesis from scratch. The fear is that a bad
| actor could create and/or set it loose as a bioweapon.
| jart wrote:
| Is it on GitHub?
| gruez wrote:
| sibling comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29270337
| dogma1138 wrote:
| No, but the entire ~190K BP sequence is available on the
| NIH website.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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.
| btilly wrote:
| No, it is that smallpox is a good candidate for a bioweapon,
| so we want to be sure that our soldiers to be protected
| against any such bioweapon that an adversary might choose to
| create. (In fact smallpox was historically used as a
| bioweapon against Native Americans.)
|
| There have been no smallpox cases in decades, so it is not a
| concern that you might travel somewhere that smallpox is a
| concern. It would have to be a deliberate attack.
|
| Separately if anyone wonders why smallpox is called smallpox,
| it is to distinguish it from the great pox, which is better
| known as syphilis. The comparison is disfiguring scars for
| smallpox, versus things like your nose falling off with
| syphilis.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| It was eradicated outside labs, but there's always concern of
| accidental releases, or that militaries will use it.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >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.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| 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.
| mey wrote:
| The amount of people I've heard say "I have a strong immune
| system" (or some variation), as if that's a defense to COVID,
| I'm sure would have no problem trotting that out against
| Smallpox.
|
| 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.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| When those who are not vaced ends up death at 30%, and far more
| disfigured we won't have an issue with that vax.
|
| Covid is deadly, but not too deadly.
|
| At this point I am half considering if I should get one just
| because - and also not sure what I would say to whom to get a
| smallpox vaccine.
| tuismuggler wrote:
| I imagine most of the skeptical people would be happy with a
| smallpox vaccine given it is a real vaccine that provides
| immunity by injecting an inactive (non replicating) virus.
| Compared to the latest ones that do something entirely
| different and at beast provide 'protection' - the CDC changed
| the definition of the word vaccine to include these latest
| bunch of jabs.
| IAmWorried wrote:
| A 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.
| fredgrott wrote:
| ahem, death rate for CID is above th death for flu.
|
| What data are you relying upon?
| luke2m wrote:
| Username checks out.
| topkai22 wrote:
| Smallpox is roughly as contagious as SARS-Cov2 Delta and
| therefore more transmossible than the original variant. However
| those numbers are the unmitigated numbers.
|
| Public health and other authority figures have some advantages
| in fighting smallpox versus SARS-Cov2. IIRC, smallpox is not
| infectious until the "pox" are visible on the body, greatly
| improving ability to screen for the disease and the vaccine
| traditional used creates a small but visible scar, again aiding
| screening.
|
| The world also maintains a significant (300M doses vaccine
| stockpile in the US as well as other countries) with already
| approved vaccines that can begin manufacturering immediately.
|
| Finally, smallpox is so deadly and obviously horrific that it
| "should" help public health officials get past vaccine and
| other mitigation "hesitantcy".
|
| A smallpox pandemic would truly be devastating and much worse
| then Covid19, but thankful there is reason to believe outbreaks
| could be controlled before pandemic status was reached.
|
| One of my biggest worries coming out of Covid19 is how
| epidemiological public health has become tied up in political
| identity and that the next pandemic will see significant
| portions of the population actively resisting outbreak control
| measures.
| lazide wrote:
| Based on what I've been able to find, Delta would have a
| 'raw' (without extensive countermeasures) R0 of 12-13
| (original Covid was measured in NYC pre-masking and lockdowns
| at 6.4). Do you have cites for the other numbers you have?
|
| Totally agree on severity (or lack thereof) being why it is
| spreading and thriving. Also the high asymptomatic spread
| helps too.
|
| You can't get the consistent, strong response in taking
| countermeasures you'd get from something more visibly
| horrific like Ebola.
|
| Though there have been many cases in Africa of someone
| sneaking in to loot a 'dead' village or graveyard and
| starting a new outbreak when they get home. So apparently
| even almost certainly dying a horrible death while bleeding
| from every opening isn't enough to get _everyone_ to take it
| seriously.
| lazide wrote:
| Smallpox is significantly less infectious, and generally
| requires close and extended contact with a person who is
| coughing and infectious or a surface recently contaminated by
| someone with open sores.
|
| Original variant was about half as infectious as measles (the
| most infectious known human disease), and some of the many of
| the new Covid variants are very very close (about 80%) as
| infectious as measles.
|
| Difference between 'you pass it to your friend' and 'you walk
| by a group of people in the park and they're infected'
| timr wrote:
| > Smallpox is significantly less infectious, and generally
| requires close and extended contact with a person who is
| coughing and infectious or a surface recently contaminated by
| someone with open sores.
|
| I don't know where you're getting your numbers. Current
| estimates for smallpox R0 are all over the place (as are the
| Covid ones, but I digress) and run from 1-20, with
| contemporary numbers as high as 6:
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11742399/
|
| Measuring R0 is not like measuring a physical constant of the
| universe, or the seek latency of a hard drive or something.
| The value varies with time and context, and the best we ever
| get for a virus is a vague idea of relative infectiousness.
| Comparing virus X to virus Y based on R0 alone is largely a
| fool's errand, particularly for a virus that hasn't been in a
| human in decades.
|
| Smallpox has rather infamously spread _between stories of a
| building from a closed laboratory_ (this is disputed, but
| plausible), so I wouldn 't be so quick to characterize it as
| requiring "close and extended contact":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_.
| ..
|
| > you walk by a group of people in the park and they're
| infected
|
| This has _never_ been documented in the entire history of
| SARS-CoV2. For that matter, there have been almost no
| documented outdoor infections, in _any_ context. These
| hysterical claims need to be put down.
| lazide wrote:
| Ah, your data is well out of date.
|
| This isn't hysteria, and I don't think hysteria is called
| for.
|
| If smallpox had these numbers, well, that is a different
| story. But smallpox has had likely thousands of years to
| evolve higher infectivity, and seems to have reached a
| local maxima that isn't there. Covid still has time to
| explore options.
|
| Measured R0 in New York for COVID was 6.4 [https://www.medr
| xiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.17.20104653v...] for the
| original strain before lockdown and masking.
|
| Those appear to have greatly reduced the basic replication
| rate to around .9-1.3 or so shortly afterwards. As they are
| very severe countermeasures, it's disingenuous to use the
| reduced replication rate 'raw' as no one is going to be
| doing them 'naturally'.
|
| The delta variant (B.1.617.2), now dominant in California
| and elsewhere, is approximately 2x more infectious than
| that original variant from the data I've found, which is
| limited [easiest thing I could fine here was https://www.np
| r.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/05/07/9947104...].
|
| That would put it (in a 'natural' setting) at R0 being
| roughly 12-13. Measles is estimated to have a R0 of 12-18.
| [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28757186/]
|
| Outdoor infection IS less likely - this study of infected
| construction workers show only 1.4% of their outdoor only
| co-workers were infected by infected workers, where 43% of
| people they lived with and 26% of people they had indoor
| contact with while working got infected. There are many
| documented cases of outdoor infections, and even more where
| no known source could be found and all indoor or other
| sources were ruled out.
|
| New variants driving up infectivity will of course drive
| this number up over time if infections are allowed to
| spread (albeit hopefully vaccination can cut it off at the
| knees).
|
| What does this mean? Without a vigorous public health
| response, Covid will continue to spread. It may continue to
| spread despite a very rigorous response from authorities
| because the body count is going to be low enough that many
| people just won't care.
|
| If we get an unfortunate deadlier variant, then maybe that
| will change. But one thing appears sure - we're past the
| point (if there ever was one) where there is anything easy
| or pleasant that is going to happen.
| timr wrote:
| > Ah, your data is well out of date.
|
| Smallpox has been eradicated since the 1970s. There is no
| other data, and the data that exists doesn't support your
| assertion. A paper from 2001 _is_ up to date.
|
| Citing point estimates for SARS-CoV2 is not a rebuttal;
| there are _many_ such estimates, and as I said, they 're
| specific to time and place. The best you can do is
| compare distributions and look for general trends.
|
| > The delta variant (B.1.617.2), now dominant in
| California and elsewhere, is approximately 2x more
| infectious than that original variant from the data I've
| found...That would put it (in a 'natural' setting) at R0
| being roughly 12-13
|
| You're just making things up. You can't take an old
| estimate, multiply it by some arbitrary factor, and draw
| a conclusion from it.
| jayflux wrote:
| > A smallpox pandemic would be orders of magnitude more deadly
| than COVID
|
| Edit: fair enough there's no vaccinations for smallpox anymore.
| But countries do still buy stockpiles
| jinpa_zangpo wrote:
| Childhood vaccinations against smallpox in the US stopped in
| 1971, 50 years ago.
|
| https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-
| abstract/49/...
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > People still get vaccinated against smallpox when they're
| young
|
| No, they don't. I do not think there is even a single country
| that routinely vaccinates children against smallpox.
| valarauko wrote:
| I don't think universal smallpox vaccination for infants is
| the case in any country now, at least since the 1980's.
| max-ibel wrote:
| No they don't, at least in the US. Older people may still be
| vaccinated in their youth (I guess when born before 1980s).
| bee_rider wrote:
| Given that widespread vaccination for smallpox stopped in the
| 70's, I guess responding to a large outbreak would be a big
| problem. I'd hope we've got lots of smallpox vaccine
| stockpiled, though.
| kupiakos wrote:
| COVID is _not_ comparable to the flu. It 's 3-20x as deadly
| depending on a variety of factors.
|
| Smallpox would still be significantly more deadly than COVID
| individually, but I'd bet people would take lockdowns much more
| seriously for smallpox than they did for COVID, preventing a
| pandemic and resulting in fewer deaths overall. Especially
| because people believe falsehoods like "COVID is comparable to
| the flu" because it downplays the risk.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Depends on the flu, and on how effective that year's flu
| vaccine is. The 1918-1919 flu had its highest mortality rate
| in the young adult range, where it was unquestionably higher
| than covid-19 (although the lack of PCR tests or equivalent
| back then make it difficult to arrive at precise numbers
| infected). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Epidemio
| logy_and_p...
| kupiakos wrote:
| Comparing modern death rates to the 1919 flu, and to
| historical smallpox infection, is not useful. Medical
| technology has come a long way in a century and so average
| mortality rates have dropped for all diseases.
|
| 2019 and 2020 had particularly dangerous flu seasons and
| were still significantly less deadly than COVID.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 2019-20 and 2020-21 were both actually milder flu seasons
| than normal, I believe you might have been thinking of
| the 2018-19 flu season?
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html
|
| Also, the principal advantage modern medicine had in
| these flu seasons, compared to 1918-1919, was that we had
| an effective vaccine for the most at-risk population to
| take, and the most at-risk were not the ones most likely
| to be out and about working. I've never seen a convincing
| explanation of why the 1918-1919 flu hit young adults the
| hardest, but whatever the reason, we're really lucky
| covid-19 did not work that way.
| jjk166 wrote:
| The 2020-2021 flu season was the mildest flu season on
| record. In the US, there were only about 700 influenza
| deaths in the 20-21 season, compared to 22,000 in the
| 19-20 season, and 34,000 in the 18-19 season. Similar
| trends were seen around the world.
|
| [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flu-has-
| disappear...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > COVID is not comparable to the flu. It's 3-20x as deadly
|
| Well, there are you, comparing them.
|
| If you do the same with smallpox you will get unrecognizable
| high numbers.
| kupiakos wrote:
| "comparable" was interpreted to mean "similar risk
| profiles", which is not true.
|
| We don't have a recent smallpox outbreak to compare to for
| mortality with modern medical treatment. It's possible
| smallpox is only 5% deadly these days, we just don't know.
| schrodinger wrote:
| Give the benefit of the doubt. It's certainly deadlier but
| still comparable in the scheme of things relative to a 30%
| death rate virus. I'm vaxxed and have a booster, mask up, and
| def not a denier but it's true that the death rate of covid
| is fairly low for most folks.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| The amount of apologizing and disclaiming in this thread is
| sad.
|
| You shouldn't have to announce your medical history to
| compare fatality rates of a virus.
| gfodor wrote:
| You're right. People are triggered by the comparison.
| chasil wrote:
| This is a good history on the effects and changing forms of
| treatment.
|
| "The case-fatality rate varied from 20% to 60% and left most
| survivors with disfiguring scars. The case-fatality rate in
| infants was even higher, approaching 80% in London and 98% in
| Berlin during the late 1800s."
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| 30ish% fatality rate of small pox.
|
| I think Black Plague was like 60% fatality rate and killed so
| many people that it's theorized it paved the way for the
| enlightenment by disrupting entrenched economic
| stratification.
|
| Covid is essentially the flu compared to a real historical
| pandemic.
|
| There were not any 'black plague' deniers.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| This is certifably false when it comes to covid and the flu:
| according to Johns Hopkins University, about 3.1 million people
| around the world had died of COVID-19 as of April 26, 2021.
| The flu, meanwhile, kills between 290,000 to 650,000 people
| every year worldwide, according to the World Health
| Organization.
| gfodor wrote:
| A 5x difference largely skewed towards the elderly and obese
| fits the definition of "comparable", but ofc this is assumed
| to be a downplaying tactic.
| himinlomax wrote:
| The flu also kills mostly the elderly and sick. In fact I
| get the impression that it does so more than Covid does.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| It is when you look at the flu data. You think the flu
| kills more people on average? It doesn't, and most people
| that die from the flu are also elderly or have pre-existing
| conditions.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Your comment is going to age like skim milk.
|
| Covid killed so many people because it was novel. It'll
| likely decline year over year as the population either
| develops antibodies or dies (of covid or natural causes).
| bastardoperator wrote:
| "likely"
|
| That doesn't sound very confident...
| jjk166 wrote:
| That's comparing covid without vaccine or widespread natural
| immunity to flu with vaccine and widespread natural immunity.
|
| Consider the 1918 flu pandemic where people were unprotected
| against a new strain and 1-3% of the world's population died.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| Depends on the definition of deaths. Most people don't get
| tested for flu. Also, in many cases, died of covid means "had
| a positive test result within two weeks of death". That's
| ignoring the dubious reliability of PCR tests in general.
| Grim-444 wrote:
| Using the very numbers you posted, covid is then between 4.7
| and 10.6 times deadlier than the flu. If your covid number is
| the total from the last two years, then it's 2.3 to 5.3 times
| deadlier than the flu. You don't think it's valid to draw a
| comparison between the two?
|
| Also those rates would be artificially high, as the elderly,
| who are overwhemingly the ones vulnerable to both viruses,
| had a yearly shot to protect them from the flu, but not from
| covid, until recently. Now that the vulnerable also have a
| layer of protection from covid as well, that multiple will
| drop much lower.
| tigershark wrote:
| These estimates are bullshit. _Only in India_ there are 4.5M
| excess deaths.
| paxys wrote:
| We know what smallpox is, how it spreads, how to slow it
| down/prevent it, and most importantly we will have a vaccine
| for it in every pharmacy well before it breaks out the way
| covid did. The two are not at all comparable.
| bluGill wrote:
| I don't think we can grow our smallpox vaccine stockpile that
| fast. We know how to make them and have the ability, but
| getting production to scale will take a fair amount of time.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| This was one of the bottlenecks that COVID vaccines faced,
| as well. Researchers made COVID vaccines relatively
| quickly, and it took a relatively long time for mass
| production to ramp up.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Smallpox vaccine can be grown in people - look at how the
| original vaccination campaigns got theirs across the ocean
| before there was refrigeration.
|
| If there was a smallpox outbreak the country the country
| would go to a sudden stop and everyone would race to be
| vaccinated, it is that deadly. Unfortunately, Covid is in
| that uncanny valley where too many people do not care until
| it hits them personally. That's why we are all fucked.
| ctoth wrote:
| It seems super unlikely, but can anyone here help reduce my
| anxiety that this might be related to the recent Monkeypox cases
| in the US? [0] Like, the timing doesn't work out, and the person
| who got infected came from Africa so we're probably not seeing
| something like community spread... And this would almost
| certainly be too old to infect people. Anything I'm missing?
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29269936
| mberning wrote:
| Just priming everybody for the next manufactured crisis.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > 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.
| shusaku wrote:
| Now just imagine what you could discover cleaning your own
| freezer
| shoto_io wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. But Occam's razor rarely makes a good enough
| story...
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Occam's razor is just the inverse of "where's smoke there's
| fire". It's really not saying much.
| gwerbret wrote:
| > Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill
| Hospital in New York, said that smallpox can be lethal "even
| after it is freeze-dried."
|
| For context, the vials were probably found in a -80C or liquid
| nitrogen -140C freezer, so they are highly unlikely to be freeze
| dried (assuming they were properly sealed).
|
| For additional possible context, it's not at all uncommon in the
| biomedical research world for vials to be forgotten in these
| freezers for decades. The classic situation is that a student or
| postdoctoral fellow has boxes in the freezer, and graduates or
| leaves without cleaning out the boxes. The boxes remain protected
| and ignored by producing a powerful "Somebody Else's Problem"
| field [0], usually until the need for freezer space becomes
| desperately dire (which I'm guessing is what happened here).
|
| Given that likelihood, AND that this was a lab working on vaccine
| research, _and_ that they found vials labeled "smallpox" _and_
| "vaccinia" (virus used to make the smallpox vaccine) side by
| side, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the CDC's concern were
| justified.
|
| [0]: Obligatory Hitchhiker's Guide reference:
| https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Proble...
| wincy wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| Even correctly labelled bottles can be dangerous. THere was an
| explosion in my lab when somebody touched a bottle of ether.
| Please don't make it any harder...
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| At my high school they found a 40 year old bottle of picric
| acid. Came with the original lab stock in 1960
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| You have to do a little more than touch ether to set it off.
| dekhn wrote:
| are you a chemist? 5 year old bottles of ether have to be
| treated exceptionally carefully to to free radicals.
| [deleted]
| duskwuff wrote:
| Ethers can form highly reactive (i.e. explosive) organic
| peroxides when exposed to oxygen, especially over a long
| period -- for example, when a half-empty bottle is left on
| a shelf for a few years.
|
| https://www.uaf.edu/safety/industrial-hygiene/laboratory-
| saf...
| dekhn wrote:
| I went back and re-read the explanation for the explosion
| in my lab.
| https://synapse.ucsf.edu/articles/2019/03/24/date-ucsf-
| histo...
|
| This is the part I knew about, since I had discussed it
| with the individuals involved when I moved into the
| office:
|
| "Well aware of the dangers of old ether, Shetlar
| carefully set the cans in the fume hood next to the
| cabinet, venting the lids. He went back to work in the
| cabinet and almost immediately heard a "pop" sound from
| the hood.
|
| However, if you read further, there are several important
| bits of data which instead show that it's more likely a
| second set of ether bottles caught on fire and ignited
| the one that exploded and sprayed nitric acid on Martin.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's a plot device in 'no time to die'.
| _jal wrote:
| I thought that too.
|
| But then I use vintage lab glassware labeled Hydrochloric Acid
| and Potassium Hydroxide for oil & vinegar containers.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Let's hope nobody has a similar sense of humor and replaces
| the contents with that which it says on the label.
| capableweb wrote:
| Luckily you rarely pour oil or vinegar directly into your
| mouth. Usually you pour it onto something else, and you'd
| discover that it contains the wrong liquid.
| labster wrote:
| I assume the oil is in the HCl because KOH would break... eh,
| never mind.
| natch wrote:
| Like the fighter jet pilot who reported all those UFOs ... he
| literally called himself the class clown type in an interview,
| yet still people believe his story.
| influx wrote:
| I'm confused what you're referring to, since they released
| videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_M0hLlJ-Q. Are you
| claiming the pilot faked the video?
| worik wrote:
| I am glad you do not work with me.
| mindcrime wrote:
| You could always put a vial labeled "smallpox" in the break-
| room fridge. But I have a feeling you will end up jobless, if
| not incarcerated, as a result. YMMV.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Outside of a lab, I seriously doubt anyone would get more
| than a laugh. Maybe my workplaces aren't serious enough.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I want to believe that you are correct. But it seems like
| everybody is so damned hyper-sensitive and over reactive to
| everything these days... _sigh_
| starwind wrote:
| My first thought was that someone young labeled it as a joke
| years ago and forgot about it
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Hopefully they're smart enough not to brag about it now that
| the feds are involved.
| trhway wrote:
| Handwriting or printer yellow dots can still lead to them.
|
| Sign of times though - calling law enforcement when you
| find old pathogen and its vaccine in a freezer in a vaccine
| development lab. MBA types. In order to mentally train
| myself for an MBA career i need to start calling law
| enforcement anytime i find a bug in the 20+ years old code.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >calling law enforcement when you find old work in the
| lab. MBA types.
|
| It's not just MBA types. Needlessly escalating up the
| chain as a means to shirk responsibility is a broader
| societal trend. Post "what do I do" about anything
| anywhere short of a prepper forum and people will tell
| you to call some external authority, the police, your
| landlord, a credentialed professional, etc, etc, and wash
| your hands of the situation. Worse still, they will
| deride others for taking the responsibility of doing
| things themselves.
|
| Odds are there's nothing of note in those vials. It's
| either a joke or the lab was previously doing something
| that's Nth order smallpox related so someone wrote
| smallpox on the vials because what's in them bears some
| logical relationship to something about smallpox, not
| because it's literally smallpox. And even if there is
| smallpox in there this is a facility that already works
| with similarly nasty things so they should already know
| how to deal with it.
|
| Had the person cleaning the fridge brought this to their
| supervisor and they decided to dispose of it however the
| CDC will (there's published best practices for this
| stuff) people would be screeching about "why didn't you
| call the .gov to save you" as if the .gov would do
| anything other than follow the same best practices for
| disposal with the added extra step of collecting evidence
| to leave the door open to prosecuting people should they
| feel the can do so and stressing the crap out of
| everybody in the process.
|
| Edit: Why don't any of the people that have decided my
| comment is wrongthink do me the courtesy of explaining
| why I'm so wrong?
| bluGill wrote:
| You are wrong because for all questions someone might ask
| the response is leave it to someone qualified.
|
| I teach my kids how to use a knife. I panic when my baby
| finds a knife, but when the baby gets a few years older I
| will make them qualified to hold a knife.
|
| If you are reasonably intelligent and able bodied (able
| bodied differs depending on the task) you can learn to do
| anything a human can do. However there isn't time to
| learn everything there is to know. Some things (brain
| surgery) take years and have a well earned reputation of
| being hard. Some things are easy.
|
| Part of disposing of this is proper documentation of your
| process all along the way. The documentation is probably
| harder than the actual work. Because mistakes are so
| dangerous we should put you in prison for attempting to
| destroy a sample and failing. If you destroy a sample you
| need to prove you did it correctly, the documentation
| that you did that should be complex.
| krotton wrote:
| Well, you're dangerously wrong in simply assuming it's
| not smallpox, having zero evidence for your thesis.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| You're bringing in character flaws into something that
| doesn't require them. Nothing is to be lost by treating
| the vials as live samples and having the appropriate
| experts deal with them. On the other hand, if you decide
| that there really isn't a risk -- a conclusion you have
| no data to support -- and you screw it up, you're going
| to unleash a pox on the world that is highly contagious
| and very few are vaccinated against. The 1978 outbreak in
| the UK [1] really upended many lives. Given the modern
| political climate in the US, I'm going to guess
| containment would be next to impossible.
|
| Maybe the risk is low, but the severity is very high. If
| there's an outbreak, we may never get it contained again.
| So, follow the appropriate protocols and hopefully no one
| gets hurt. If it turns out they were a prank or not
| viable, no one gets hurt either. This has nothing to do
| with shirking responsibility. It's quite the opposite.
| Going all cowboy on the handling of the samples would be
| incredibly selfish. For what? The ability to tell a story
| of sticking it to the man?
|
| [1] -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbre
| ak_in_the_...
| BbzzbB wrote:
| Really? Contacting the CDC after finding
| "smallpox"-labelled vials in a vaccine research lab
| sounds like the responsible thing to do and completely
| unrelated to MBAs.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I actually just got my MBA so I feel extra qualified to
| answer this statement.
|
| When you see something that does not seem belong where it
| is, you cannot pretend that did not see it. In fact,
| willful blindness is a thing. There is a reason CYA has
| become a well known acronym.
| trevyn wrote:
| I'm curious, do you see the fundamental vulnerability in
| this state of affairs?
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| That is an interesting question and I am inclined to
| answer it, but I don't want to assume the meaning behind
| it. Could you narrow it down a little to make sure I
| don't misinterpret it?
| trevyn wrote:
| > When you see something that does not seem belong where
| it is, you cannot pretend that did not see it.
|
| 1) How do you decide if something "belongs where it is"?
|
| 2) If a large proportion of a society agreed on a
| decision function and behaved as you suggest, is there a
| straightforward way an adversary could take advantage of
| this situation?
|
| 3) Bonus: Is there evidence this is happening today?
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| >> 1) How do you decide if something "belongs where it
| is"?
|
| Experience and training. I just went through somewhat
| extensive system testing. Without going into specifics,
| there were several instances of 'expected behavior' vs
| 'actual behavior'. But this example may be a little too
| esoteric.
|
| Lets say I walk around my house and see a book nested in
| a tree growing next to the fence. Does the book belong
| there? I would venture it does not. Reasonable person
| standard probably could apply here.
|
| >> 2) If a large proportion of a society agreed on a
| decision function and behaved as you suggest, is there a
| straightforward way an adversary could take advantage of
| this situation?
|
| Yes. And, in a sense, it is already being exploited in
| most visible way via social media. But I disagree with
| the phrasing of your question, because I think US society
| already behaves this way, which is precisely why it is
| being exploited.
|
| >> 3) Bonus: Is there evidence this is happening today?
|
| See #2.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Good luck getting that mentality ingrained into society.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Um.. I don't want to sound dismissive, but that mentality
| is part of society already ( especially if you consider
| the surveillance US population happily places where they
| live ).
| trhway wrote:
| No law enforcement != no action ("pretend that did not
| see it"). Classic strawman. You definitely got your money
| worth as your post has all the qualities of an MBA type.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I am assuming good faith. What part of my statement is a
| strawman?
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| No law enforcement != no action ("pretend that did not
| see it").
|
| Hmm. Despite the edit, I still do not see it as strawman.
| The important piece and this may be the piece missing
| from this conversation is 'what action did I take?'. It
| is not that law enforcement is necessary in all, most, or
| even some instances. The question is whether you IGNORE
| something that should not be ignored.
|
| Again, it is possible I am not understanding your
| argument. Please elaborate.
| rasengan wrote:
| https://news.yahoo.com/bill-gates-warns-smallpox-terror-0001...
|
| Just like he said about covid.
| ajvs wrote:
| 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?
| mulmen wrote:
| Well he isn't "just a billionaire with no expertise or
| special clearance in this domain". He has spent more time
| working on vaccine distribution and disease eradication than
| he spent as CEO of Microsoft. He founded and leads an
| organization that operates in this domain. He's literally one
| of the leading global experts in this domain.
| retrac wrote:
| You don't have to go far to find a book written pre-2019 that
| outlines the pandemic that just occurred down to a T. This is
| something a lot of smart people hypothesized and it's
| something a lot of people took seriously. Indeed the
| catchphrase for it was probably "when, not if". I sure didn't
| think Gates sounded apocalyptic or unrealistic when he did
| his TED Talk about the future pandemic. It was all stuff I
| already knew! I just didn't expect it _quite_ so soon.
| mizzack wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ardit33 wrote:
| Sounds like the start of a disaster movie.
|
| I feel after these last couple of years have been in such a way,
| that Hollywood needs to up the ante on their disaster movies.
|
| Things that were outlandish and seen only on TV are becoming
| reality.
| andbberger wrote:
| Thing is, it's ridiculously to create smallpox just from the
| sequence. A grad student could do it easily. You order DNA in a
| few parts (the full sequence is one of few things you can't just
| order), splice them together, transfect it into a cell line and
| in about a week you're manufacturing smallpox
| oasisbob wrote:
| Smallpox has a genome with approximately 200k base pairs.
|
| I think you're underestimating the difficulty of synthesizing
| and amplifying a full genome of this size.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| How different is it to other pox viruses? You might need a
| few snips...
| andbberger wrote:
| Grad student I know says he could do it in a week
| prohobo wrote:
| I love this reply, thank you
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Is there anything like how copiers won't copy money to stop
| mail order DNA places from supplying smallpox (and similar)?
| btbuildem wrote:
| > In the event of an outbreak, the C.D.C. said, "there is enough
| smallpox vaccine to vaccinate every person in the United States."
|
| I wonder whether the CDC has re-evaluated their scenarios and
| simulations given the politicization of vaccines during this
| pandemic.
| yosito wrote:
| IIRC, the smallpox vaccine is the one that scars you for life.
| I bet a lot of people would be afraid of it at first, but a 30%
| fatality rate is probably high enough to change a lot of
| antivaxers' minds.
| snerbles wrote:
| Anecdata, but my smallpox vaccine scar is a small, ~1cm spot.
|
| The risk of "inadvertent autoinoculation" was my bigger
| concern - if you touch the site before it's fully healed, you
| can spread the vaccina virus to other parts of your own body.
| In rare cases it's been known to cause blindness. Fortunately
| a Tegaderm dressing kept it contained to my shoulder, but
| damn did it itch like crazy for those few weeks.
| rectang wrote:
| I have a smallpox immunization scar on my upper arm. It's
| about the size of a quarter and not very ugly. It is trivial
| compared to the disfigurement that typically came with
| contracting actual smallpox.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Also, being dead is terrible for your skin, so.
|
| And anyway, if everyone has the scar we've all got the same
| tiny deduction in 'attractiveness,' so it cancels out I
| guess.
| max-ibel wrote:
| Yeah, but the scar is fairly small and can be in a place that
| isn't showing. That would be the least of my concerns ...
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Smallpox is much nastier than COVID. After a few days of the
| nightly news showing bulldozers pushing piles of bodies into
| mass graves, I imagine vaccine uptake would be better than our
| current situation.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Don't take this as a serious analysis, but I can't help but
| attribute so much anti-covid vaccine mentality to the fact that
| Covid is NOT a visible disease, and quite frankly, it's
| lethality is a dice-roll. Perfectly healthy twenty-somethings
| can be laid-low while retirees can show no symptoms. The
| disease has to be taken seriously but its variability skews
| people's perception of it.
|
| Smallpox, on the other hand, is absolutely grotesque in
| comparison. Highly visible and much more lethal. In terms of
| human perception I think that fear of catching it would
| overrule the fear of 'the government' or 'the pharmaceutical
| companies'. It also probably helps that the Smallpox vaccine
| has been around for a lot longer.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| There's no need to fear the .gov or big pharma when it comes
| to smallpox because there's no need to trust them in the
| first place. The smallpox vaccine is old and very well
| proven.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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 one
| (probably they are in the same ballpark accounting for
| error bars and population growth since the '60s).
|
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM196911272812205
|
| Anyway, all this is to say -- there are definitely
| complaints to be had about big pharma, but the industry is
| pretty good at managing measurable risks nowadays. I don't
| know if 'old and well proven' is quite right. They were
| working with a different set of tradeoffs -- they had worse
| tech at the time, expectations were lower (and medicine was
| generally more dangerous)... but obviously, better than
| getting smallpox!
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| There is a certain truth to this. I'm listening to the
| wonderful History of Byzantium podcast, and an episode is
| devoted to the plague during Justinian's reign that killed
| maybe 40% of the population of Constantinople. Whole ships of
| dead sailors drifted the seas. The description of the disease
| progression caused by Yersinia pestis is awful. People were
| throwing themselves off buildings to end their suffering. So
| higher mortality, and more visible, less ambiguous symptoms
| (like necrosis, giant lymph nodes, etc.).
|
| Not to discount the seriousness of covid at all. I have a
| relative in his 40s whose life hangs on a thread right now.
| [deleted]
| cbxyp wrote:
| When will you guys stop being fools for a few minutes and stop
| being coincidence theorists? For once, try assuming that there
| are 'people' in charge who have nothing but contempt for people
| with views that run directly counter to reality and are utterly
| dismissive of valid conjecture and independent investigation.
| They've lied to you about the safety and efficacy of mRNA
| vaccines (they have no idea about safety or efficacy and that
| should be clear with "boosters" and Pfizer's extensive criminal
| history regarding forged trial results), they hold big
| biosecurity events that directly precede releases of dangerous
| viruses.
|
| https://aaronsiri.substack.com/p/fda-asks-federal-judge-to-g...
|
| The FDA has asked until 2076 to release the data they used to
| approve the Pfizer "vaccine". Deny it all you want, excuse away
| this behavior with "Occam's razor" and your belief in their
| excuses all you want. If you do not question at this point what
| is going on then you are being led by the nose like a fool. I
| can't believe personally a community of self-professed "Hackers"
| has devolved to a collective preaching blind trust in omnipotent,
| proven malevolent authorities..
| dang wrote:
| Can you please not break the site guidelines like this? It's,
| well, against the site guidelines, and it's also not in your
| interest. When you post like this, you're hurting your own
| case, in exchange for the momentary relief of venting/railing
| against "fools". (I don't mean just you, of course--this is a
| common problem; most of us have it to some degree.)
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the
| intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
| Note these two:
|
| " _Please don 't fulminate._"
|
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic
| tangents._ "
| simonbh wrote:
| Do you actually look into what this document is stating? The
| document linked to in this article is not from the FDA, but
| from the group suing them for the FOIA request. This filing,
| and others from this group, are only allegations. This is not
| evidence from the FOIA process nor a statement from the FDA.
| Since I cannot find the original sources of these documents, I
| can only link to these: Docket:
| https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21087968-txn-42021cv...
| Filing 1: http://phmpt.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/10/001-Complaint-10... Filing 2:
| https://www.sirillp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/020-Secon...
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