Deciding to culture the samples, versus just destroying them without analysis, must be accompanied by an interesting risk/benefit analysis.
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.