How smallpox claimed its final victim | Hacker News Reader

How smallpox claimed its final victim

bbc.com

51 pointsmorpheos13714 comments

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I'm currently reading Pandemic by Sonia Shah (see also her The Fever on malaria):

* https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250118004

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23847947-pandemic

In it she mentions monkeypox:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeypox_virus

Seems that it has made the jump to humans, and those who were vaccinate against smallpox are somewhat protected against it.

So it may be that we have eventually have another 'pox virus that floats around. At the very least we have a lot of the 'base research' done on each, and so developing a vaccine wouldn't be difficult.

If Covid had symptoms as physically horrific as Smallpox, Bubonic Plague or Ebola, I think there would be fewer people rejecting a vaccine.

If it didn't, there would be less need for one, no?

You would think that, but there was a smallpox epidemic in Montreal in 1885 where vaccination became mandatory, and people rebelled against that, attacked pharmacies selling the vaccine, etc.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89pid%C3%A9mie_de_variole_...

(in french)

This case was mentioned multiple times on the This Week In Virology podcast as strong evidence that the lab leak hypothesis is nonsense.

No pandemic was started despite the virus leaking from the lab. And no pandemic was started after all the other hundreds of lab accidents that we know off, including after the multiple leaks of the original SARS virus from China and Singapore labs.

All the pandemics that we know off started naturally.

Sample size way too small. The lab leak theory of SARS-Cov-2 is very compelling given what we know. It may not have been exactly a lab leak, either. The researchers may have gotten it “naturally” during the course of their research in the field, etc. we will never know for sure.

If smallpox was as contagious as Covid is then a lab leak could have started a pandemic. Often times these polemical arguments against lableak origin for covid ignore important details like that.

Smallpox seems to be about as contagious as Covid as measured by R0.

Doesn't strike me as particularly strong evidence. The victim's mother probably stopped a smallpox outbreak by identifying the symptoms as not-chickenpox. Unfortunately COVID-19 symptoms are not as distinctive.

Rather than saying "all the pandemics that we know of started naturally", it would be more accurate to say that all pandemics started naturally, that we know of. Particularly in the case of the 1977 Russian flu, there are suspicions of an anthropogenic origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu

That's a pathetic argument.

Most of the world was immunized against smallpox, of course it didnt spread like wild fire.

The two situations couldn't be more different.

covid-19 came out of the lab in wuhan china, dont fool yourself.

Wat? We stopped routinely immunizing against small pox a long time ago.

The leak mentioned in the article happened in 1978. At a time when I'm pretty sure most people were still inoculated against smallpox.

In 1978 when this happened most of the world was immunized.

That's how smallpox was eradicated in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization

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