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Comment by pram | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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?

The one where small vials of smallpox are occasionally found abandoned in lab freezers.

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?

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.

That's quite a regulatory hack. Thanks for explaining it to me.

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.

https://youtu.be/ozg7gEchjuM?t=152

>Lyme disease is believed to have originated from Plum Island,

Wait, what?!

Next we're going to be hearing about the Montauk Monster.

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

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.

Is it on GitHub?

No, but the entire ~190K BP sequence is available on the NIH website.

sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29270337

There is still the fear of accidental outbreaks from situations like OP, or biowarfare.

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.

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.

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.

It was eradicated outside labs, but there's always concern of accidental releases, or that militaries will use it.

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