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?
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?