Vials labeled ‘smallpox’ are found in Pennsylvania laboratory
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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]
"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...
It sucked and that was just a baby version…
In this case, I think it was done to assess the risk of this kind of discovery in the future. If these samples had failed to be viable that would have been a huge relief for everyone.
If some gov’t lab deep in Siberia has some samples - how big a problem would i be? actually?
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.
The incentives that support this type of research will be (or are) too high to ignore.
I wouldn't worry too much about hamstringing containment efforts.
If it was some kind "new ebola," I could imagine a much more aggressive response, with much less political polarization.
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"
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.
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?
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.
People look at risks and benefits and generally make their minds up pretty rationally, if you account that not everybody values things exactly the same as you do.
Covid is really not that much of a risk if you're otherwise healthy and the vaccines are not highly effective as the smallpox one is (in fact stated definitions of vaccine had to be revised so it would not be excluded). The absolute risk reduction is just not all that high, and some people are disinclined to jump to getting new therapies without much long term data.
You see the rational behavior play out when you look at vaccinations by age. 98% of people over 65 in the US have had one dose and 86% have had two. Because that's where the risk gets higher. Elderly people are not vastly better educated, smarter, less susceptible to propaganda, or lean toward political ideologies that are more inclined to take it, or have significantly easier access to it.
It's just that they get more benefit from the vaccine and they understand that and act accordingly.
If there was an especially transmissible smallpox epidemic killing 30% of people who contracted it and a vaccine that provided lasting immunity to 95% of people who took it, 99.something% of people would take it I bet.
But what about when how they value things is not rational?
Consider for example people who are rejecting COVID vaccines because they believe that they contain luciferase (they don't, BTW, although luciferases were likely used in the development of the vaccines). Why, you might wonder, would someone care about whether or not the vaccines contained bioluminescent enzymes?
I've seen two reasons. (1) somehow the bioluminescent enzymes are supposed to make it so the government can track you, and (2) the name comes from the word "lucifer" when clearly means that the vaccine is the work of or promotes Satan.
If someone truly believes either of those things then arguably it is rational for them to decide that the risks of the vaccine outweigh the benefits, but nevertheless I would not call their overall behavior rational.
Quite a few of the reasons for rejecting COVID vaccination given by people who end up as the subjects of /r/HermanCainAward or /r/CovidAteMyFace posts would apply just as well to smallpox vaccination, and quite a few of those people are in high risk COVID groups or situations.
I'm talking about the vast majority of people who are not vaccinated because they just aren't inclined to rush to get new medical treatments of little benefit to them.
Do the stats for the over 65 group honestly not make the situation clear to you? Focusing on the 0.1% lunatic fringe doesn't help your understanding, and it's the reason so many people are utterly baffled by what is easily explainable. Life is not the 20 loudest and most obnoxious twitter accounts.
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 evidence of their harms than covid does (not sure if you've ever seen an image of smallpox).
The lessons of covid vaccine hesitancy are barely applicable to a hypothetical smallpox outbreak.
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.
You're talking about the quality of the cost-benefit analysis, which I alluded to in my charitably-phrased parenthetical about rigor. That doesn't mean it isn't a cost-benefit analysis, and doesn't make it the same thing as religious adherence to pro- or anti-vaxxing. While some portion of the population engages in this approach, my point is that it's a lot fewer than most people think. That doesn't mean I think the cost-benefit analysis is high-quality, but that modeling these people as dogmatically irrational instead of very bad at being rational is misleading.
In stark contrast to Covid, the nature of smallpox outbreaks makes it so that even an extremely dumb person nominally engaging in cost-benefit analysis would have little trouble making basic inferences about the outcomes faced by people they knew who contracted it vs people they knew who didn't. I got vaccinated because I estimated that my low risk of a bad time after contracting Covid was higher than my low risk of a reaction to the vaccine. If for some reason, I didn't have access to the vaccine, it very likely would not have materially changed my young, healthy, no-comorbidity life.
There's another trivial rebuttal of your hypothesis, outlined in a sibling comment:
> You see the rational behavior play out when you look at vaccinations by age. 98% of people over 65 in the US have had one dose and 86% have had two. Because that's where the risk gets higher. Elderly people are not vastly better educated, smarter, less susceptible to propaganda, or lean toward political ideologies that are more inclined to take it, or have significantly easier access to it.
In your model of most people as not considering the cost-benefit tradeoff of vaccines, how do you explain the significant age disparity?
> The first vaccine hesitancy campaign literally was against the smallpox vaccine in Stockholm
This was _literally the first vaccine for a contagious illness_. You'd have to be irrational _not_ to have some degree of skepticism about being infected with a contagious disease, especially in an era with a population accustomed to a state with infinitely lower capacity and infinitely lower reach into everyday life. A quarter of a millennium later, in a society where the state licenses and ensures our safety in a trillion different publicly-known ways, the reactions of 1750s Swedes could not be less applicable.
Again, the pivotal difference relative to my framing is the approach to vaccines as an all-or-nothing tenet of religious faith, to be rejected with prejudice or embraced with devotion. This is obviously a fairly popular (implicit) perspective on public health, which makes it easy to lose sight that most people do not think like this, even the dumb ones.
> I don't see how you could say that there would be no hesitancy to it.
Kindly don't put words in my mouth. I said that Covid hesitancy is a different enough context that it's not usefully-applicable to a hypothetical future smallpox outbreak.
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.
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.
Syphilis used to be called "the great pox", which is where smallpox got its name from.
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.
What data are you relying upon?
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’
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.
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.medrxiv.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.npr.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.
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.
In reality none of these numbers have any scientific validity, as they are usually computed using methodologies that aren't valid. In particular R0 is often simply a free variable in a model, i.e. a fudge factor in which the values are brute forced until the model output comes into line with reported government statistics. What does this fudge factor represent, if anything? Nobody actually knows, so it gets labelled R and then announced as a "fact" by epidemiologists. But then someone else takes a slightly different data set and runs the same calculation, but with a totally different R0 value coming out the other end.
This seems like something at risk of being a self fulfilling prophecy. How would something like that be documented? You can't do contact tracing on random people you walk past in the park. Even the contact tracing apps, sparsely used as they are, generally require a 15 minute contact period to "count". We've assumed that it can't happen, but we have no way of knowing if it did happen.
(Anecdata, accompany with 0.36g sodium chloride: I was speaking to someone over the weekend who claims they can pinpoint to a 20-minute window when they got infected (on the basis that they could not have caught it from anyone else that day) and they reckon that they got it from walking down an extremely densely crowded alleyway. Due to a testing screwup, this person isn't even documented as having had Covid at all. Of course, they may be mistaken, but nevertheless it goes to show that just because something happened, doesn't mean it will be recorded.)
1. We have people getting infected with covid after provable close contact with others that are infected.
2. We have comparably few infections at outside events when people are standing close to each other, but it does happen.
Even if you have no contact tracing for the walk-by infection case, just by looking at numbers 1 and 2 you could extrapolate to non-close contact outdoors not being very infectious.
Or reasoning from another perspective, if walk-by were enough to infect people, everyone would have already had it.
Edit: fair enough there’s no vaccinations for smallpox anymore. But countries do still buy stockpiles
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/49/...
No, they don't. I do not think there is even a single country that routinely vaccinates children against smallpox.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/vaccine-basics/index.html
[2] https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/vaccine-education-cent...
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/bioterrorism-response-planning/...
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.
You shouldn't have to announce your medical history to compare fatality rates of a virus.
"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."
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.
2019 and 2020 had particularly dangerous flu seasons and were still significantly less deadly than COVID.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flu-has-disappear...
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.
Well, there are you, comparing them.
If you do the same with smallpox you will get unrecognizable high numbers.
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.
You can compare anything you want (e.g. COVID and Cancer outcomes), but to say COVID isn’t so bad because lung cancer doesn’t kill that many people every year is a bad logical fallacy.
The Flu has a vaccination, it’s got natural immunity, and we have a good understanding of it. COVID was brutal even with social distancing measures (where the flu was greatly reduced by the measures last year), so I’m not quite sure what the takeaway is from the comparison.
But I am with you - I think this will settle in at some point, and it will be as back to “normal” as we can, with just some people dying of COVID instead of Flu or Pneumonia or whatever would have eventually taken them before.
The vast majority of people don’t want to be super-spreaders. No one thinks they are actually being a super-spreader, but COVID presents as either asymptomatic or as mild allergies for a portion of the population. Which makes it really hard to wrap one’s head around and a wicked problem from a public health standpoint - “It’s not so bad it’s like a mild cold - why should I change my life for that?” or “Wait, you mean my slight cough can end up killing the people I might infect if I go out tonight? But to me it just feels like seasonal allergies. It’s probably not covid”. Ideally the vaccinations will reduce the number of people who die from a mildly symptomatic person going out by some factor of x. Because we can’t have everyone with seasonal allergies shelter in place forever.
It’s impossible to determine how many people will die from the infection that a mildly symptomatic person has if they go to the mall. In aggregate, it’s not zero (otherwise the pandemic would run its course and not be a problem). Sure, even if it’s a 1% chance someone with mild symptoms transmits COVID if they go to a busy shopping mall, that person has a 1% chance of death. But then they may spread it. So maybe it eventually results in .01, 0.1, 1, or 10 people dying per mildly symptomatic person going shopping? There are so many variables it’s nearly impossible to model, and every variable is now a political issue (contagiousness, are deaths really caused by COVID, vaccination rate, masking and distancing). And if the virus mutates and becomes the next more contagious variant in that person, then it could be hundreds of thousands of people.
But at some point, we have to say “OK - can’t test everyone, we have enough vaccinated people to be good, and this is reality - we need to accept a 0.01 “death factor” for this disease when a mildly symptomatic person participates in society. And I do think (or hope) that eventually that factor will line up more closely with the Flu - or ends up better than the flu’s factor (which is non-zero, but it’s a fact of life so we just keep it moving through Flu season).
To be fair, we don’t know if the population of people at the mall would die at the same rate as what COVID is doing overall with the population.
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.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).
"likely"
In fact, supposedly the analysis of just how bad that flu epidemic had been (and how it had been largely ignored) is what basically created the postmodern version of the practice of epidemiology we still use today ?
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.
With those countermeasures, the flu season last year was “unusually low throughout the 2020-2021 flu season both in the United States and globally, despite high levels of testing … The low level of flu activity during this past season contributed to dramatically fewer flu illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths compared with previous flu seasons. For comparison, during the last three seasons before the pandemic, the proportion of respiratory specimens testing positive for influenza peaked between 26.2% and 30.3%. In terms of hospitalizations, the cumulative rate of laboratory-confirmed influenza-associated hospitalizations in the 2020-2021 season was the lowest recorded since this type of data collection began in 2005. For pediatric deaths, CDC received one report of a pediatric flu death in a child during the 2020–2021 flu season. Since flu deaths in children became nationally notifiable in 2004, reported flu deaths in children had previously ranged from a low of 37 (during 2011-2012) to a high of 199 (during 2019-2020).“
It’s apples to oranges, but I’d take the Flu over COVID. Because we do have natural immunity and we do have better established vaccines for it.
[1] From the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm#...
0.2% compared to as high as 30%. So we had 150x reduction in the flu’s prevalence last year from distancing measures. Not saying COVID would have been 150x worse than what we experienced, but it would have been far, far worse than the Flu without the mitigation efforts if you want to try to treat them equally. It was objectively much worse than the Flu last year, not even close. The positive test rate in Oklahoma is >50%![1], but to be fair somewhere between 5-10% looks like average across states. Oklahoma may have limited tests available and/or only test severe cases… Or they are somehow better at testing than other places in the country.
[1] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/states-r...
Consider the 1918 flu pandemic where people were unprotected against a new strain and 1-3% of the world's population died.
Also, what do you mean by "in many cases" here. Like let's say if you are admitted to a hospital after a gun shot wound and happened to have Covid and die the next day due to the injury -- is it a Covid death?
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.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/bioterrorism-response-planning/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Child_with_Smallpox_Bangl...
If that doesn't convince the vaccine hesitant, i dont know what will.
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.
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.
I didn't look into these numbers to deeply as they seemed to be under active debate and my point was that smallpox is in the range of Delta, not the specific number.
were europeans conferred some residual resistance by variants being endemic across europe, but not the americas?
That's a myth, stemming from Howard Zinn. Zinn basically scoured various underground and left-wing pamphlets, some even anti-american cold war propaganda, and collected that all into an underground history, called "A People's History of the United States". It's wildly popular among a certain subset of the population, who take what's written there as gospel.
Zinn never provided a source for the small-pox blanket trope. Not because he invented it (I don't think he did) but because citing propaganda is not a good look for a historian.
When you try to do some archeological digging of these urban legends, the closest thing you can find in terms of real history is a letter from colonial times when there was a mention of this as a possible war strategy by a British administrator, Sir Jeffery Amherst, but there is no evidence anything like this actually happened during the British rule or after independence.
By the time it reached Zinn, it was turned in US cavalry officers actually giving blankets to Indians in the 19th Century. From then it spun out into popular culture. I think it's even included in the Simpsons.
The problems with polemicists like Zinn or Chomsky is that they go looking for any evidence to support their thesis (namely that America is an evil empire committing atrocities around the globe), which makes for very bad history. I mean, I could mine Swiss newspapers, interviews, selectively quote from some policy papers, and make it look like Switzerland is some violent third world hell-hole if I had enough time and a strong enough obsession to prove my point.
But that's not history, because it doesn't tell you the big picture or the main facts, instead it focuses on things that either didn't happen at all, or were exceptional. People who read that stuff come away with a truly warped view of the world, and then this penetrates into popular sites even like wikipedia. For example, the "US Overthrow" of Iranian Mossadeq or the 1973 Pinochet coup are completely misrepresented, whereas things like US involvement in supporting Algerian rebels and African left-wing rebels is erased. So you don't get an understanding of US policy or the factors driving it, which are not easily reducible to soundbytes or simple analyses. Similarly the anti-communist military action by the Dutch in Indonesia after WW2, the Korean War (Chomsky claims it was the US that was the aggressor), and even key facts about the Vietnam war and the Khmer Rouge are massively distorted.
This results in students having holes where huge parts of history are entirely missing, and have been replaced with hate, and a lot of people emerge from that scene very angry and militant, both at the U.S. and more recently at Europeans in general, which I guess is the whole point of teaching this stuff - to create angry, radicalized, students. I hope you escaped that trap.
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?
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.
I've also wondered if there is some sort ability to order innocuous sequence A from company a, innocuous sequence B from company b and then in the privacy of your own lab do the DNA synthesis equivalent of A xor B to get dangerous sequence C.
Weird, that's kind of how computer antivirus software works.
It would take an unlikely chain of events for it to reestablish itself from that starting point, but it’s possible.
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...
[1] https://www.fda.gov/drugs/news-events-human-drugs/fda-approv...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/bill-gates-smallp...
The articles on this are very clickbaity. Bill Gates did not warn of a small pox attack. He used it as an extreme example of bio warfare which the world can prepare against through investing more in desease & epidemic research.
Relevant @ 28:49
Well that is comforting, as long as it was a small number of vials, it is safe.
> 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.
Just like he said about covid.
It's like the people who argue that "Elon Musk is a rocket engineer in title only" because he went to school in physics rather than engineering. Like, you don't think being the CEO and lead engineer of SpaceX for almost 20 years is a better education than a 4 - 8 year degree?
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s1117-monkeypox.html
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wait, what?!
I think you're underestimating the difficulty of synthesizing and amplifying a full genome of this size.
The methodology required was involved. They point out the difficulties dealing with the hairpin telomeres which would also be encountered with smallpox:
However, poxviruses represent special challenges because of the size (many exceed 200 kbp) and the difficulty of cloning features such as the mismatched hairpin telomeres. Poxviruses also cannot simply be recovered from transfected cells, as the DNA is not infectious.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Right now you still need a pretty substantial lab and knowledge to pull it off but at some point you might be reading on hack-a-day “How I hacked my food synthesizer to produce Ebola..”
I only hope that our ability to defense against such pathogens would advance at least as fast as we commoditizing the ability to play with proteins and amino acids on a molecular level…
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.
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.
Perhaps like this upcoming comedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbIxYm3mKzI
Doesn't help that the "standard" smallpox vaccine is quite nasty in terms of application and side effects (leaves a scar): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine#ACAM2000
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.
They're not remotely the same thing. The former drops to less than 50% effectiveness after six months, the latter eradicated the disease.
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...
If it's effective, why do we need boosters?
It's a convenient money grab for industrial drug dealers, and their pet politicians get a power grab.
The smallpox vaccine didn't need a booster after six months. Because it's a vaccine.
The COVID preparations do, because they're not vaccines. They're treatments. That are risky, and weakly effective.
They're only called "vaccines" because the Ministry of Truth has been very busy this year rewriting the definition of "vaccine".
Would you only take the first Smallpox vaccine, or would you get the booster every 3 years?
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/smallpox/index.html
Adverse reactions (including myocarditis): https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/vaccine-basics/vaccination-effe...
It also eradicated small pox since the vaccine was mandated.
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.
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?
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_outbreak_in_the_...
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.
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.
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?
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.
But then I use vintage lab glassware labeled Hydrochloric Acid and Potassium Hydroxide for oil & vinegar containers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picric_acid#History
It has friction and impact sensitivity comparable to TNT (see tables 13.4.6.5.1 and 13.5.1.5) according to the UN's "Classification Procedures, Test Methods and Criteria Relating to Explosives of Class 1":
https://unece.org/DAM/trans/danger/publi/manual/Rev5/English...
https://www.uaf.edu/safety/industrial-hygiene/laboratory-saf...
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.
Yeah that's the point. That's why they sell it in cans at Walmart. As long as you're already expecting to handle flammables it's not really a big deal. It's only about twice (in my observation having dicked around with both) as spicy as gasoline.
I wonder whether the CDC has re-evaluated their scenarios and simulations given the politicization of vaccines during this pandemic.
And anyway, if everyone has the scar we've all got the same tiny deduction in 'attractiveness,' so it cancels out I guess.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Not to discount the seriousness of covid at all. I have a relative in his 40s whose life hangs on a thread right now.