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]
Given the period of 2010-2012, the president at the time was Barack Obama. It does not seem realistic that people would accept opening a criminal case.
Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power? Sure, their politics influence the nation's foreign policies. But domestic partisan politics is largely irrelevant to the international partners. To the foreign nationals affected by it, you're just USA either way.
I mentioned just the other day, the problem with anti-intellectualism in the US and how it's fed by these sorts of egregious meddling by the administration. There are much less educated and affluent countries that are nowhere near as anti-science as the US. Yet unfortunately, the US exports it abroad too. I explicitly referred the same Pakistani case as an example of that. I'm all for Osama's elimination, but they jeopardized the entire humanity's future by misusing the vaccination program for it.
Despite a century of this nonsense (remember the radium girls?), neither political party cares enough to not pervert science in the interests of humanity. Smallpox and Polio were horrible diseases that caused untold miseries. Even the remote tribes of Pakistan knew their dangers well enough to participate in their elimination, until the US pulled off this dirty stunt. This is a deeply ingrained toxic culture that was reinforced by both parties over the decade. This should be a war crime irrespective of party allegiances.
CIA at its best, f_cking up world one bit at a time (and amount of those bits amount to quite a few kilobytes at least at this point, I can attest that every European country I've ever lived in carries some more or less visible involvements in past few decades although this one is quite a spectacular clusterf_ck)
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.
As a non-American I don't care what you do, if you want to behave like irresponsible idiots without any regard for the lives of others you have that right. Just don't subject vulnerable individuals in other countries to your own bad choices (you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful). Maybe visitors from the United States should have to present vaccine certificates at airports or be quarantined at their own expense.
There is no reason to believe that a lack of nitrogen was a problem in particular. It seems that most effort was spent on getting fertilizers with phosphorus and other minerals, nitrogen was secondary, as many plants can obtain it from the air. If anything, it allows our modern, heavily cereal skewed diet. Poor nutrition rarely meant an absolute lack of food, most of the time it only meant insufficuent quality, and the green revolution was a massive step backward in that regard
That is literally true, but for anyone who hasn't studied plant biology, I think that "some plants have evolved specific structures to host obligate symbiotic bacteria that obtain nitrogen from the air and convert it into a form usable by the plant" is close enough to "many plants can obtain [nitrogen] from the air".
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.
So creating cheap, reusable giant rockets is standing in the way of human progress? Being able to use neural links to restore sight to the blind is standing in the way?
Yes, I'm sure that starting the EV revolution, creating a satellite based internet network that covers the all planet and making space launches fully reusable and 10x cheaper is "standing in the way of human progress and history".
These people have been a problem in the west for over a century. They are unintelligent people who spend their lives fighting what confuses them, and replacing it with something worse, that they can understand.
It's not what his businesses are doing, it is what he says and what he spreads to a tech bro disciple that spreads this shit far away, working with technologies like AI at the forefront, ending up setting us back in our progress & history.
Same applies to Thiel, Zuckerberg and whoever not. Read up on Thiel & Trump, then come back.
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."
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.
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?"
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.)
This is tangential to your point, but smallpox vaccine protects against mpox (the virus formerly known as monkeypox) and the CDC still recommends it for people in certain mpox risk groups.
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.
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?
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.
Paywall-free link: https://archive.today/Toq4Y
That's got to be one of the greatest legacies in all human history. No politician or other empire-builder comes close.
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.
We still have another chance for eradication in humans with Polio.
Not if the CIA has anything to say about it: CIA fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...This should be a war crime...
War crimes are "for Africa and thugs like Putin".
Given the period of 2010-2012, the president at the time was Barack Obama. It does not seem realistic that people would accept opening a criminal case.
Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power? Sure, their politics influence the nation's foreign policies. But domestic partisan politics is largely irrelevant to the international partners. To the foreign nationals affected by it, you're just USA either way.
I mentioned just the other day, the problem with anti-intellectualism in the US and how it's fed by these sorts of egregious meddling by the administration. There are much less educated and affluent countries that are nowhere near as anti-science as the US. Yet unfortunately, the US exports it abroad too. I explicitly referred the same Pakistani case as an example of that. I'm all for Osama's elimination, but they jeopardized the entire humanity's future by misusing the vaccination program for it.
Despite a century of this nonsense (remember the radium girls?), neither political party cares enough to not pervert science in the interests of humanity. Smallpox and Polio were horrible diseases that caused untold miseries. Even the remote tribes of Pakistan knew their dangers well enough to participate in their elimination, until the US pulled off this dirty stunt. This is a deeply ingrained toxic culture that was reinforced by both parties over the decade. This should be a war crime irrespective of party allegiances.
CIA at its best, f_cking up world one bit at a time (and amount of those bits amount to quite a few kilobytes at least at this point, I can attest that every European country I've ever lived in carries some more or less visible involvements in past few decades although this one is quite a spectacular clusterf_ck)
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.
Who is we, who will pay for it, and how will such informational inoculation benefit the rich?
The current media status quo, and its consequences does, which is why we get to enjoy it.
As a non-American I don't care what you do, if you want to behave like irresponsible idiots without any regard for the lives of others you have that right. Just don't subject vulnerable individuals in other countries to your own bad choices (you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful). Maybe visitors from the United States should have to present vaccine certificates at airports or be quarantined at their own expense.
Food produced by Fritz Haber's Haber-Bosch process (making fertilizer) supports about half of the world's population.
He has quite a bit of chemical warfare weighing down his record.
He killed millions. He fed billions.
Epstein was friendly with, and made more people smile, than he raped.
Phil Spector produced music which meant a lot to a lot of people. Still a murderer.
Harold Shipman Saved the lives of thousands, yet should always be labelled a mass murderer because he knowingly positioned hundreds.
>Harold Shipman Saved the lives of thousands
Probably not though, I don't think a typical GP saves thousands of lives
There is no reason to believe that a lack of nitrogen was a problem in particular. It seems that most effort was spent on getting fertilizers with phosphorus and other minerals, nitrogen was secondary, as many plants can obtain it from the air. If anything, it allows our modern, heavily cereal skewed diet. Poor nutrition rarely meant an absolute lack of food, most of the time it only meant insufficuent quality, and the green revolution was a massive step backward in that regard
Plants cannot obtain nitrogen from the air. You are deeply misinformed on this subject.
> Plants cannot obtain nitrogen from the air
That is literally true, but for anyone who hasn't studied plant biology, I think that "some plants have evolved specific structures to host obligate symbiotic bacteria that obtain nitrogen from the air and convert it into a form usable by the plant" is close enough to "many plants can obtain [nitrogen] from the air".
(A link for anyone not familiar with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nodule)
I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur wins this one, though.
I completely agree, but to be fair, there are some people who are politicians and helped to eradicate a disease [0] [1].
[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/guinea-worm-disease-nearly-erad...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_dracunculiasis
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.
Is there any way that people can work to re-introduce it into society? I know some folks are making a lot of progress with MMR.
Politicians and empire-builders (Elon) is currently standing in the way of human progress and history.
So creating cheap, reusable giant rockets is standing in the way of human progress? Being able to use neural links to restore sight to the blind is standing in the way?
There was another group of people famous for building innovative rockets, but are otherwise not associated with human progress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb
So it is about the big picture. (And about small pictures like that of Elon making a salut like the other group).
So yes, currently his rockets do not transport explosives. But that can change anytime and I expect it will very soon.
I thought American space flight etc was directly indebted to the people behind the V bombs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
I'm pretty sure that GP commenter was referring to the other stuff.
Yes, I'm sure that starting the EV revolution, creating a satellite based internet network that covers the all planet and making space launches fully reusable and 10x cheaper is "standing in the way of human progress and history".
If you people could only hear yourselves talk...
These people have been a problem in the west for over a century. They are unintelligent people who spend their lives fighting what confuses them, and replacing it with something worse, that they can understand.
It's not what his businesses are doing, it is what he says and what he spreads to a tech bro disciple that spreads this shit far away, working with technologies like AI at the forefront, ending up setting us back in our progress & history.
Same applies to Thiel, Zuckerberg and whoever not. Read up on Thiel & Trump, then come back.
I'd add people who helped to increase overall population higyene standards, study conducted by dr. Humphries [1] shows how important that was
https://www.amazon.com/Dissolving-Illusions-Disease-Vaccines...
You created an account to shill for a product?
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Genghis Khan??
Genghis Khan also not too bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica
Whose peace are we now living under and what atrocities did they commit to establish it?
I thought it was clear from my statement about politicians and empire builders that I was talking about people who did good, useful things.
No? That’s not at all obvious.
Greatest, not most fucked
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.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_United_States_smallpox_va...
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."
Just in time to roll over in his grave.
Smallpox is not measles! But, point taken.
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Yeah how dare he... helps eradicate diseases!
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.
(https://screenrant.com/the-dark-knight-best-two-face-harvey-... for those unfamiliar with the quote)
He did a great service to humanity
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?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debat...
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.)
Most people nowadays are not vaccinated against smallpox anymore
This is tangential to your point, but smallpox vaccine protects against mpox (the virus formerly known as monkeypox) and the CDC still recommends it for people in certain mpox risk groups.
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.
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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.
If you don’t keep it then the first time you’ll get to study it will be when the first bodies are recovered from your cities.
Coincidentally, that would be the first time it would be urgent to study.
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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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderpest
> AFAIK nobody kept copies
Unfortunately this is not the case: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63707-z
:(
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Funnily enough, RFK Jr. is doing what he can to bring its human cousin back:
"Measles virus evolved from the then-widespread rinderpest virus most probably between the 11th and 12th centuries."
Good thing that smallpox wasn’t eradicated due to a vaccine.
Vaccinia is very different from Smallpox. Or perhaps I misunderstand you?
That was sarcasm, right?
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> Construction of an infectious horsepox virus vaccine from chemically synthesized DNA fragments
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?
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.
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
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.