And it comes at a time when a disease we were working on eliminating, measles, has come back and the US is about to lose its measles-free status.
It sounds as if his legacy is to be unique, a feat never to be accomplished again.
quesera 2 hours ago [-]
We still have another chance for eradication in humans with Polio.
3eb7988a1663 48 minutes ago [-]
Not if the CIA has anything to say about it: CIA fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan[0]
...The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden. It led to the arrest of a participating physician, Shakil Afridi, and was widely ridiculed as undermining public health.[2][3] The program is credited with increasing vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan[4][5][6][7] and a rise in violence against healthcare workers for being perceived as spies.[8] The rise in vaccine hesitancy following the program led to the re-emergence of polio in Pakistan, with Pakistan having by far the largest number of polio cases in the world by 2014.[8]
Perhaps I'm overly an optimist, but I have a feeling we will develop the informational and psychological technology to combat the destructive misinformation campaigns that brainwash people into harming their children with anti-vaccine beliefs.
We are not there yet, because the destructive media forces are too new and we haven't developed defenses against information diseases like RFK Jr. But we will get there. Two steps forward, one step back.
s0rce 2 hours ago [-]
Norman Borlaug probably comes close. H. Trendley Dean was also impactful on a large scale, while its seemingly less important it helps a lot of people.
s5300 2 hours ago [-]
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deadbabe 3 hours ago [-]
Genghis Khan??
andrewflnr 2 hours ago [-]
I thought it was clear from my statement about politicians and empire builders that I was talking about people who did good, useful things.
iwontberude 3 hours ago [-]
Greatest, not most fucked
m-hodges 4 hours ago [-]
I don’t think many people know about or remember the 2003 smallpox vaccination campaign.¹
> The campaign aimed to provide the smallpox vaccine to those who would respond to an attack, establishing Smallpox Response Teams and using DryVax (containing the NYCBOH strain) to mandatorily vaccinate half a million American military personnel, followed by half a million health care worker volunteers by January 2004. The first vaccine was administered to then-President George W. Bush.
Nobody in Hn type circles wants to remember it because looking back with hindsight it was clearly just part of the theater to get people wringing their hands about whatever chemical or biological WMDs they alleged Saddam had and they killed the program as so as they got their invasion.
Wikipedia somehow makes it eve worse than that:
"The campaign ended early in June 2003, with only 38,257 civilian health care workers vaccinated, after several hospitals refused to participate due to the risk of the live virus infecting vulnerable patients and skepticism about the risks of an attack, and after over 50 heart complications were reported by the CDC."
kwhat4 5 hours ago [-]
Just in time to roll over in his grave.
quesera 3 hours ago [-]
Smallpox is not measles! But, point taken.
sowbug 4 hours ago [-]
And to see himself become the villain.
junon 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah how dare he... helps eradicate diseases!
sowbug 2 hours ago [-]
At least he went down fighting (https://archive.is/M4nek, the op-ed referenced in the article). That's an impressively dignified response to a gobsmacking shift in public opinion. In his position, I might have given up and gone full Two-Face.
Except it wasn't eradicated. It's still stored at the US's Fort Detrick, and in Russian and Chinese bioweapons facilities, too be released as a bioweapon, now that no one has natural immunity anymore.
fuckyah 1 hours ago [-]
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blell 5 hours ago [-]
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treetalker 4 days ago [-]
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ks2048 4 hours ago [-]
Hold my heroin spoon.
fake-name 5 hours ago [-]
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tialaramex 5 hours ago [-]
It might be possible to reintroduce Smallpox and I guess that idiots who also think coal is a good idea might actually be stupid enough to make it happen. But, fortunately humans did wipe out one other disease and unlike Smallpox it wasn't deemed useful as a biological weapon so AFAIK nobody kept copies, it's just gone.
In theory, it's very much doable. We brought back an extinct cowpox virus a while ago using mail-order DNA. Did you know that Smallpox's nucleotide sequence is freely available online?
XorNot 4 hours ago [-]
You're going to have to link that for me because I know the longtermism people are nuts about this, but their actual understanding is pretty poor.
There's a gulf between assembling a vaccine - which is a commonplace technology, and assembling a viable infectious viral particle.
Being able to order all the oligos of a viral sequence isn't even step 1.
olivia-banks 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure if I understand your comment, but they were able to grow and propagate scHPXV in their lab. Link the sequence? Sure, it's on NCBI
As for getting the nucleotides themselves, there are numerous services for ordering oligonucleotides which you can "stitch together." I think this used to be done with phosphoramidite synthesis, but the article I linked says they used plasmid synthesis, and ordered from ThermoFisher.
I'm not sure what the price would be on this (I would imagine very high?), but it has to be cheaper than phosphoramidite chemistry. Nevertheless, the price of doing this sort of things w/ plasmids is plummeting.
4 hours ago [-]
CaliforniaKarl 3 hours ago [-]
I'm starting to think that we should be calling it "contained", not "eradicated". Eradication invites the question "Well then, why do we still need the vaccine?"
dgacmu 1 hours ago [-]
It really is eradicated - it's the only human disease we've truly eradicated. There are literally no more cases of smallpox in the wild, period.
The problem is that there are samples of viable virus in the labs of the US and Russia. So - it's eradicated but we have to keep stockpiles of vaccine around anyway. But nobody gets vaccined for it any more; it has an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio when the virus simply does not circulate. Smallpox kills ~30% of people who get infected with it; the first-generation vaccine had a mortality rate of about 1 in 1,000,000.
(There are newer-generation vaccines developed and being developed that have an even better safety profile but we still wouldn't use them because the cost - the literal cost and the side effects and general "meh, why get another shot?"-ness outweighs the benefit of protection against something you don't need protection against.)
yen223 3 hours ago [-]
Most people nowadays are not vaccinated against smallpox anymore
quesera 3 hours ago [-]
We don't vaccinate against smallpox, but keep in mind that at least two countries maintain live smallpox virus in government labs.
The bad actors are predictable. And I suspect at least two others are lying.
fuckyah 1 hours ago [-]
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Rendered at 05:03:58 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It sounds as if his legacy is to be unique, a feat never to be accomplished again.
We are not there yet, because the destructive media forces are too new and we haven't developed defenses against information diseases like RFK Jr. But we will get there. Two steps forward, one step back.
> The campaign aimed to provide the smallpox vaccine to those who would respond to an attack, establishing Smallpox Response Teams and using DryVax (containing the NYCBOH strain) to mandatorily vaccinate half a million American military personnel, followed by half a million health care worker volunteers by January 2004. The first vaccine was administered to then-President George W. Bush.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_United_States_smallpox_va...
Wikipedia somehow makes it eve worse than that:
"The campaign ended early in June 2003, with only 38,257 civilian health care workers vaccinated, after several hospitals refused to participate due to the risk of the live virus infecting vulnerable patients and skepticism about the risks of an attack, and after over 50 heart complications were reported by the CDC."
(https://screenrant.com/the-dark-knight-best-two-face-harvey-... for those unfamiliar with the quote)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderpest
Unfortunately this is not the case: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63707-z
"Measles virus evolved from the then-widespread rinderpest virus most probably between the 11th and 12th centuries."
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
In theory, it's very much doable. We brought back an extinct cowpox virus a while ago using mail-order DNA. Did you know that Smallpox's nucleotide sequence is freely available online?
There's a gulf between assembling a vaccine - which is a commonplace technology, and assembling a viable infectious viral particle.
Being able to order all the oligos of a viral sequence isn't even step 1.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001611.1
As for getting the nucleotides themselves, there are numerous services for ordering oligonucleotides which you can "stitch together." I think this used to be done with phosphoramidite synthesis, but the article I linked says they used plasmid synthesis, and ordered from ThermoFisher.
https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/cloning...
I'm not sure what the price would be on this (I would imagine very high?), but it has to be cheaper than phosphoramidite chemistry. Nevertheless, the price of doing this sort of things w/ plasmids is plummeting.
The problem is that there are samples of viable virus in the labs of the US and Russia. So - it's eradicated but we have to keep stockpiles of vaccine around anyway. But nobody gets vaccined for it any more; it has an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio when the virus simply does not circulate. Smallpox kills ~30% of people who get infected with it; the first-generation vaccine had a mortality rate of about 1 in 1,000,000.
(There are newer-generation vaccines developed and being developed that have an even better safety profile but we still wouldn't use them because the cost - the literal cost and the side effects and general "meh, why get another shot?"-ness outweighs the benefit of protection against something you don't need protection against.)
The bad actors are predictable. And I suspect at least two others are lying.