> 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]
Tangentially, I've been on an SCP [1] binge lately, and it's interesting to see the cues SCP takes from the real world. Your quote could be taken verbatim from one of their stories.
> The frozen vials "were incidentally discovered by a laboratory worker while cleaning out a freezer in a facility that conducts vaccine research in Pennsylvania"
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.
A smallpox pandemic would be orders of magnitude more deadly than COVID. COVID has a very low death rate and is comparable to the flu, whereas Smallpox kills 30% of people it infects and disfigures an even higher percentage. And my understanding is that it is just as contagious (may be wrong on this).
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.
Smallpox is significantly less infectious, and generally requires close and extended contact with a person who is coughing and infectious or a surface recently contaminated by someone with open sores.
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’
This is certifably false when it comes to covid and the flu:
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.
Smallpox is roughly as contagious as SARS-Cov2 Delta and therefore more transmossible than the original variant. However those numbers are the unmitigated numbers.
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.
We know what smallpox is, how it spreads, how to slow it down/prevent it, and most importantly we will have a vaccine for it in every pharmacy well before it breaks out the way covid did. The two are not at all comparable.
COVID is not comparable to the flu. It's 3-20x as deadly depending on a variety of factors.
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.
It doesn't take that much. If you're good enough at DNA build from oligos, could probably synthesize it with less than a PhD. It is expensive though, and very unlikely that anyone would actually do it in a way that evades the surveillance systems.
Is that actually possible? Labs have to prepare biological samples before freezing them. Otherwise, ice crystals will destroy any cells or viruses that they are trying to preserve.
> Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, said that smallpox can be lethal “even after it is freeze-dried.”
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.
As I mentioned this years ago here I once found microscope slides in my grandpa basement labeled small pox. He was a doctor/ scientist. Everyone said that the slides would contain inactive virus that were of no threat. I’ve long gotten rid of them because I haven’t owned a microscope in ages and with the internet can always look up small pox there.
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.
Why would it be labelled "smallpox" and not "Variola"? Smallpox is not a virus, it's a condition caused by the Variola viruses. That's like labelling a sample of HIV as "AIDS"
If I were going to label a vial that held an extremely deadly but extinct-in-the-wild virus, I would label it in such a way that anyone who stumbled upon it would immediately know what they had so that they could take appropriate action. "Variola" just doesn't do that.
A passing mention in the middle of the article caught my eye:
> 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.
I'm curious what kind of privileged insight could Gates have when he's just a billionaire with no expertise and special clearance in this domain? Or is this such a high likelihood scenario that it's the first thing any billionaire would come up with?
It seems super unlikely, but can anyone here help reduce my anxiety that this might be related to the recent Monkeypox cases in the US? [0] Like, the timing doesn't work out, and the person who got infected came from Africa so we're probably not seeing something like community spread... And this would almost certainly be too old to infect people.
Anything I'm missing?
Same family of virus, but not directly related. So, no, there can't be any connection between those events.
Chickens don't transmute into Eagles, notwithstanding both being birds.
Variola is so an obviously scary and debilitating disease that an isolated outbreak would be easily contained. And you're only actively contagious after you become obviously sick.
[+] [-] gnat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwertox|4 years ago|reply
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]
[+] [-] chasil|4 years ago|reply
"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...
[+] [-] foo92691|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com
[+] [-] theandrewbailey|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shusaku|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shoto_io|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IAmWorried|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lazide|4 years ago|reply
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’
[+] [-] bastardoperator|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] topkai22|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayflux|4 years ago|reply
Edit: fair enough there’s no vaccinations for smallpox anymore. But countries do still buy stockpiles
[+] [-] eunos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kupiakos|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fredgrott|4 years ago|reply
What data are you relying upon?
[+] [-] luke2m|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 323|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] COGlory|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koeng|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] natch|4 years ago|reply
It would take an unlikely chain of events for it to reestablish itself from that starting point, but it’s possible.
[+] [-] dahfizz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwerbret|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] throwawaysea|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 14|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] programmarchy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahfizz|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.fda.gov/drugs/news-events-human-drugs/fda-approv...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/bill-gates-smallp...
[+] [-] T0Bi|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Sophistifunk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lolinder|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] COGlory|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miked85|4 years ago|reply
Well that is comforting, as long as it was a small number of vials, it is safe.
[+] [-] wolfgang42|4 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] rasengan|4 years ago|reply
Just like he said about covid.
[+] [-] ajvs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctoth|4 years ago|reply
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29269936
[+] [-] elzbardico|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elzbardico|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kolanos|4 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s1117-monkeypox.html
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] api|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyhb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ardit33|4 years ago|reply
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.