> 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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_...
It sounds as if his legacy is to be unique, a feat never to be accomplished again.
...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]
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.
If Bush was in Power, of course the accusation would have to made against Bush. So, of course, the accusation has to be made against the president that was in charge at the time. Dark skin color does not give him a "Get Out of Jail Free Card".
How can you open a war crime case against a guy who already got a Peace Nobel Prize? And what war crime? Was there a war? Maybe some special military operation against Bin Laden.
Henry Kissinger (1973 Nobel Peace Prize together with Lê Đức Thọ) can be considered a war criminal:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger
Yasser Arafat (1994 Nobel Peace Prize together with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres) was also very likely a war criminal.
This fact only further proves one thing: the CIA is a terrorist organization and the state behind it is responsible for some of the most disgusting things this planet has ever seen.
What made me disappointed about this was that they revealed how they did it, and they didn't rescue the doctor who helped them pull it off.
Sounds like RFK Jr…
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.
Things in the US are going to get far worse from here, and there will be a political war, but at least there will be a political war against the fascism. A lower bound has been established for badness that at least allows saving democracy in the US. I have not been this hopeful since October 2024.
The current media status quo, and its consequences does, which is why we get to enjoy it.
Pun intended?
if you are still alive.
Thinning this is a US problem completely misunderstands the nature of the misinformation problem.
And I hope there's vaccination requirements for travel, according to how public health officials determine threats.
At this point, anyone pushing anti-vaccine thinking as an American problem is just pushing anti-American bias. Vaccine misinformation and hesitancy is an almost worldwide problem.
There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox, which led to the discovery that infection with cow pox (which is relatively harmless) provided immunity to small pox - hence 'vacca cine', vacca = cow in latin.
But there's a long history of people trying to self vaccinate with all sorts of things against small pox including using scrapings off somebody's small pox wounds to hopefully give oneself a light infection. Needless to say that came with well understood side effects up to and including full-on small pox infection. But when the death rate is 30%, people were willing to do some crazy things, because the risk:reward was seen as worth it.
---
FWIW I did ultimately decide to vaccinate my children against measels, but it was not an easy decision, because it is in general not that risky a disease whose mortality rate had already precipitously declined (from 13 per 100k to 0.19 per 100k) [1] before a vaccine was first introduced in 1963. Obviously I think it's the right decision, but I also wouldn't really fault anybody for going the other direction either.
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death-r...
All non-natural cause of death in the US, excluding suicide, is about 1.3 micromorts per day. So it's the same all non-natural cause risk you'll be exposed to over the next week. The page offers a lot of other comparables - traveling 100 miles by biking, 2500 by car, or 10k by airplane, and so on.
You can take your risk with herd immunity if you want. That works well now, with a near universal vaccination rate. But if the rate drops below 90%, then you will get infected.
My parents both got measels, and they had no hesitancy getting me vaccinated. I’m significantly taller than my dad, who lost 40 pounds when he got German measles when he was 17. I grew several inches that year.
People who don’t get vaccinated are bad people. I have no qualms saying it.
American exceptionalism at its finest!
You do realise the vast majority of those "tourists, business travelers, and migrants" are all fully vaccinated?
Various social decisions have led to countries you might think of as measles free, no longer being measles free. For instance Canada, the UK, Spain, and obviously Mexico are all now considered to have endemic measles, with Canada and Mexico already compromising the majority of visitors and "visitors" to the US. And the vaccines are not complete immunization. Double dose measles is around 97% effective, meaning you can expect at least 3% breakthrough infections, possibly more depending on factors such as age, immuno compromisation, degree of exposure, and so on.
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.
Probably not though, I don't think a typical GP saves thousands of lives
It really was a two-man team that discovered nitrogen fixation - the other being not Carl Bosch, but Robert Le Rossignol who assisted Haber in developing his bench-scale nitrogen fixing reactor. Carl Bosch led the team that scaled it up, and that was a large effort of hundreds of people.
The Haber–Bosch process was never a two‑man mission to “feed the world.” Haber devised a laboratory method to fix nitrogen, and Bosch led the first industrial‑scale implementation, but neither of them was personally producing, optimizing, transporting, and applying fertilizer across the globe. Turning that reaction into most of the world’s nitrogen fertilizer required teams of chemists, engineers, metalworkers, factory operators, agronomists, logistics workers, and farmers, and an entire century of industrial expansion. If it truly were a two‑person accomplishment, we would only need a handful of farmers per country, which is obviously not how agriculture or industry work.
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)
[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/guinea-worm-disease-nearly-erad...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_dracunculiasis
Meanwhile, I have no problem admitting that my question mark was decorative, and acknowledging my claim that you are engaging in bad faith discussion.
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.
1. boundary layer cooling
2. pre-heating fuel and cooling the nozzle by pushing the fuel through tubes in the nozzle
3. baffles to prevent pogo-ing
4. turbo fuel pumps
5. supersonic airframe
6. guidance system (although primitive)
The V2 was an ineffective military weapon that did little damage - because its guidance system was too primitive to be able to hit a target. Hitler also poured enormous resources into the V2 program, shifted away from producing weapons that were effective.
What use is a reusable rocket with respect to explosives?
That vehicle could deorbit and drop a tungsten penetrator, smallpox, a nuclear device or any number of things.
All funded by a combination of government spending and defrauding the public via the Tesla Ponzi scheme.
In the real world we so far just managed to keep space free of military weapons not because they are expensive, but because of treaties. I just don't expect those to last much longer.
And frankly I never looked into the concept, but why do you think, a space base tungsten penetrator would be way more expensive, than a nuke on a missile?
Humans are pretty clever at devising ways to kill each other. The Russians put a garbage can of concrete on a ersatz ballistic missile on a terror strike against Ukraine. Like you said, these things don’t exist because of treaties.
Hapazardly and chaotically dismantling the US public sector on some ideological crusade was not advancing human progress. Netiher was turning Twitter into some farcical shell of its former self, owned by Saudi Arabia. Neither was sabotaging projects such as high-speed rail systems purely out of spite.
> Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system. … At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.
Any good he has produced along the way (that mitigates the damage he is causing) is only a means to an end for him, and he would have no hesitations burning it all to the ground the moment it suites him. If everyone acted like him humanity would be doomed, not quickly progressing toward some technological utopia.
Or, as his acquaintance Sam Altman put it: "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it."
Do you think Elon knows a single thing about rockets? Do you actually think he has literally anything to do with them? He isn't even capable of forming a sentence without stuttering, much less actually doing literally anything at all. Keep defending your pedophiles, bro. I'm sure in 10 years you'll be glad we have a written record of your stance.
I will take the word of the world’s foremost rocket engine engineer who was in the room with Musk a lot of times, to someone posting in ignorance on the Internet.
It's really sad you would take the word of paid-off ego glazers and insult your own intelligence by buying into the super-genius bullshit Elon wants you to.
The truth is pretty clear: he's just a sex fiend and likely pedophile who pays people to say nice things about him. It is clear as day that anyone not on his payroll has no love for him whatsoever.
Same applies to Thiel, Zuckerberg and whoever not. Read up on Thiel & Trump, then come back.
Whose peace are we now living under and what atrocities did they commit to establish it?
Ask yourself: if you honestly intended to create peace, would a century or more (in the case of Rome) of bloody conquest actually be the optimal plan? I would say no. An actual plan for peace through strength looks more like NATO than Rome.
Any good an empire builder does is accidental. Whatever they tell you or even themselves, they do it for glory and power, and their actions are optimized for that over any actual benefits. They were not nobler than the conquerors and colonizers were rightfully decry today.
(https://screenrant.com/the-dark-knight-best-two-face-harvey-... for those unfamiliar with the quote)
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.)
mRNA vaccines go from sequenced DNA to vaccine without any need to store or culture the original virus in the lab.
We could destroy our existing stockpile of smallpox and be ready to produce vaccines based on it faster than we could thirty years ago.
We couldn't validate new vaccines without access to the live virus, but then, if we aren't willing to expose hopefully-volunteers to a disease with a 30% mortality rate, we weren't really validating it anyway.
But yeah, I think we could probably unilaterally "disarm" and destroy our smallpox samples, and from a national security standpoint, I don't think we'd be significantly worse off; if the weaponized strain is significantly different from the old strain, enough to bypass vaccination, we'd need samples of the new thing in any case.
I'm not even sure we'd be substantially limiting new research on it, given that smallpox doesn't infect animals, I'm not sure if there's even any animal testing we could do with a live virus.
So yeah. Destroy the samples already.
The bad actors are predictable. And I suspect at least two others are lying.
Maybe Russia or China are funding anti-vax idiots in the US so that it only affects America :-D
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.