I never understood why smallpox resurrection is so feared. It was heavily suppressed with 19th century organization and technology in developed countries and eradicated even in Somalia with 20th century ones. If it reappeared in NYC somehow, it would be very easy to track given its visible symptoms and quickly eliminated.
Depends on your threat model, I suppose. I expect any accidental outbreak to pretty much play out that way.
However, if it were weaponized, I’d expect it to be distributed more widely and released more-or-less simultaneously in hopes of overwhelming the system.
This still seems kind of suicidal for a nation state. They could vaccinate their own populace first, but then they might lose the element of surprise.
That leaves terrorists, who are mainly trying to intimidate people, and only incidentally cause damage to do so, making them less threatening than they would like to appear.
Advancing biotech makes such attacks more likely as it lowers the bar, but it also enables better responses to threats, like the sewage monitoring and rapid vaccine development we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, disappointing as the government’s performance was.
I agree that most of the risk from smallpox comes from a weaponized strain. Given what we know about the Soviet bioweapons program, I think any form of weaponized smallpox released would be engineered to bypass existing vaccines. This would make getting the smallpox vaccine in anticipation negative EV.
Also, wasn’t there a theory that the smallpox vaccine gave partial protection against HIV?
I both think and hope that you’re right and a smallpox outbreak could be easily contained, but I’m not confident enough in this to be unconcerned. If large amounts were released to overwhelm the system, this could cause a lot of death, particularly in urban areas. I would be particularly concerned if I lived in a crowded slum/favela, because I imagine smallpox could rapidly spread through the populace before quarantine efforts could do much.
Another thing is that smallpox symptoms appear flu-like for the first several days of the infection. During this period it’s quite contagious. It’s plausible that, in the case of smallpox being released, people will assume it’s just a respiratory illness (“Whew, looks like I tested negative for Covid!”) and spread it before the characteristic pustules appear and the authorities react. (Disclaimer: I am not an epidemiologist, merely a concerned citizen)
I never understood why smallpox resurrection is so feared. It was heavily suppressed with 19th century organization and technology in developed countries and eradicated even in Somalia with 20th century ones. If it reappeared in NYC somehow, it would be very easy to track given its visible symptoms and quickly eliminated.
Depends on your threat model, I suppose. I expect any accidental outbreak to pretty much play out that way.
However, if it were weaponized, I’d expect it to be distributed more widely and released more-or-less simultaneously in hopes of overwhelming the system.
This still seems kind of suicidal for a nation state. They could vaccinate their own populace first, but then they might lose the element of surprise.
That leaves terrorists, who are mainly trying to intimidate people, and only incidentally cause damage to do so, making them less threatening than they would like to appear.
Advancing biotech makes such attacks more likely as it lowers the bar, but it also enables better responses to threats, like the sewage monitoring and rapid vaccine development we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, disappointing as the government’s performance was.
I agree that most of the risk from smallpox comes from a weaponized strain. Given what we know about the Soviet bioweapons program, I think any form of weaponized smallpox released would be engineered to bypass existing vaccines. This would make getting the smallpox vaccine in anticipation negative EV.
Also, wasn’t there a theory that the smallpox vaccine gave partial protection against HIV?
I both think and hope that you’re right and a smallpox outbreak could be easily contained, but I’m not confident enough in this to be unconcerned. If large amounts were released to overwhelm the system, this could cause a lot of death, particularly in urban areas. I would be particularly concerned if I lived in a crowded slum/favela, because I imagine smallpox could rapidly spread through the populace before quarantine efforts could do much.
Another thing is that smallpox symptoms appear flu-like for the first several days of the infection. During this period it’s quite contagious. It’s plausible that, in the case of smallpox being released, people will assume it’s just a respiratory illness (“Whew, looks like I tested negative for Covid!”) and spread it before the characteristic pustules appear and the authorities react. (Disclaimer: I am not an epidemiologist, merely a concerned citizen)