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Why Don't Scientists Kill The 'Demon In The Freezer'?
HughPickens.com writes: Smallpox was one of the most devastating diseases humanity has ever faced, killing more than 300 million people in the 20th century alone. But thanks to the most successful global vaccination campaign in history, the disease was completely eradicated by 1980. By surrounding the last places on earth where smallpox was still occurring -- small villages in Asia and Africa -- and inoculating everyone in a wide circle around them, D. A. Henderson and the World Health Organization were able to starve the virus of hosts. Smallpox is highly contagious, but it is not spread by insects or animals. When it is gone from the human population, it is gone for good. But Errol Moris writes in the NYT that Henderson didn't really eliminate smallpox. In a handful of laboratories around the world, there are still stocks of smallpox, tucked away in one freezer or another. In 2014 the CDC announced that vials containing the deadly virus had been discovered in a cardboard box in a refrigerator located on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland. How can you say it's eliminated when it's still out there, somewhere? The demon in the freezer.
Some scientists say that these residual stocks of smallpox should not be destroyed because some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox, even more virulent than existing strains of the virus. We may need existing stocks to produce new vaccines to counteract the new viruses. Meanwhile, opponents of retention argue that there's neither need nor practical reason for keeping the virus around. In a letter to Science Magazine published in 1994, the Nobel laureate David Baltimore wrote, "I doubt that we so desperately need to study smallpox that it would be worth the risk inherent in the experimentation." It all comes down to the question of how best to protect ourselves against ourselves. Is the greater threat to humanity our propensity for error and stupidity, or for dastardly ingenuity?
Some scientists say that these residual stocks of smallpox should not be destroyed because some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox, even more virulent than existing strains of the virus. We may need existing stocks to produce new vaccines to counteract the new viruses. Meanwhile, opponents of retention argue that there's neither need nor practical reason for keeping the virus around. In a letter to Science Magazine published in 1994, the Nobel laureate David Baltimore wrote, "I doubt that we so desperately need to study smallpox that it would be worth the risk inherent in the experimentation." It all comes down to the question of how best to protect ourselves against ourselves. Is the greater threat to humanity our propensity for error and stupidity, or for dastardly ingenuity?
Why don't we just keep a record of the genetic sequence of the virus? Doesn't the technology exist to rebuild the virus if we know its DNA sequence? Even if it doesn't exist now, it could reasonably be expected to exist in the relatively near future, right?
Then we could destroy all the actual samples, but no information would be lost. If it became necessary for research at a later date, whatever couldn't be simulated could be made from scratch.
I agree that in an accidental exposure that it could be contained. We were successful in containing ebola in isolated exposures, so I believe we would successfully contain smallpox, too. The summary indicates that smallpox might be needed to create vaccines in the event that smallpox or a similar virus was used as a biological weapon. That's where I think there would be a lot more difficulty in containing the spread of the virus. If a laboratory technician handling the virus was exposed, there would be reason to suspect a smallpox infection I'd symptoms developed. If a member of the general public was exposed, I'm not sure that it would be diagnosed correctly. That's not a knock on doctors so much as there's no reason to think of it because the prior probability of a patient having smallpox is basically zero.
Agreed. In practice, viruses have a tendency to never go away. Just take a look at the people who have been "cured" of ebola. Months or years later, some of them start showing symptoms again, because the virus found a reservoir inside an eyeball or some other random part of the body where the immune system is not as effective.
Also, the claim that smallpox can only infect humans is naïve. It can, in fact, infect other primates. So the fact that it is no longer found in humans does not mean that it can't come back on its own. It is unlikely, but not impossible. In fact, it is highly likely that the initial smallpox epidemics were caused by the virus making its way into humans from some other animal species. If it happened once, it could happen twice....
So the assertions upon which the author built the argument against smallpox are somewhat dubious, IMO. With that said, that doesn't mean that the conclusions are wrong. The important question is whether we can continue to manufacture smallpox vaccines indefinitely without the actual virus. If the answer is yes (and I believe that it is), then destroying the most likely way for the virus to end up spreading among the population does make sense.
Any recurrence of the virus, whether natural or artificial, would either be different from the known smallpox strains in meaningful ways or it wouldn't. If it is different, then the current smallpox virus probably won't be of any real benefit in developing a vaccine for the new variant; they would need samples of the new virus instead. If it isn't different, then the existing vaccine will "just work", and we don't need the current smallpox virus.
Either way, the only plausible future use for smallpox would be as a biological weapon, and IMO, we owe it to future generations to destroy it.
And as I post this, I'm struggling to avoid laughing. Because of a bit of over-editing, that last sentence almost ended with "... and IMO, we owe it to future generations to do so." Yikes!
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The thing is, the existing vaccines aren't even derived from smallpox. They're derived from a related virus that isn't fatal. We don't need smallpox to exist just to produce vaccines unless somebody genetically engineers a modified smallpox virus that doesn't contain any of the same markers as cowpox, monkeypox, or vaccinia. And if somebody does that, the odds are very high that A. having a sample of smallpox won't help in creating the vaccine either, and B. the organization that someday creates that modified virus wouldn't have been able to get their hands on it if we had destroyed all the samples in a timely manner instead of keeping it around just in case we need to engage in biowarfare....
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Then zap it. They can already create viruses from scratch anyhow - https://www.newscientist.com/a... So, just dump its DNA sequence to a tar file, and then snuff it out. That simple. And no moral dilemas about genocide because well, we can always tar xvf smallpox.tar, if we need to.
Actually, there is no known medical use for it anymore, and I do believe they've completely sequenced it and could recreate it if that were ever necessary for some reason.
As to minimal damage in the wild? That's B.S.. Have you been vaccinated against smallpox in the last decade? Probably not as routine vaccinations were stopped in 1972, and unfortunately the high level of resistance it gives only lasts 4-7 years. Nobody really knows what the resistance level, if any, is after 20 years, much less than 45+ years.
We currently don't have stockpiles of the vaccine, and as such, if there was an outbreak, it would run rampant long before enough vaccine to matter had been made. There would be a lot of dead people. Ok, you say, let's just stock up on it ahead of time. Well, there's a couple of issues with that. First, it might expire, so you'd have to keep making it constantly. I don't know what it's actual shelf life is, but vaccines of any kind aren't exactly canned peas and some of them are positively short time get it while it's fresh only.
Then there's your second big problem. Cost. You'd have an expensive production facility, and storage, and security, and you'd have to keep replacing the stock once you'd built it up enough, and probably some other things you'd have to pay for. Now mind you that this is all for a virus that is dead in the wild, and has very limited lab samples remaining. That's like making 14k gold Tasmanian Tiger repellents for everyone in Australia! It's a very expensive exercise for something that's about as likely as a meteor strike at this point.
But it gets worse. One of the big issues with all vaccines is they work best before you get exposed. (Many only help if you've had them before you've been exposed.) I've seen some stuff saying that the smallpox vaccine takes close to a week before it's protecting you. So that means you're going to have to be vaccinating the population, and revaccinating them about every 7 years to keep the immunity levels high. DO YOU HAVE AN IDEA HOW EXPENSIVE AND FREAKING DIFFICULT THAT IS THESE DAYS, ESPECIALLY WITH ANTI-VAXXERS?
Yeah, we can't get them to vaccinate for Polio and Whooping Cough, two other diseases that were on the fast track to oblivion before those morons made a whole new generation of potential victims and cut down the herd immunity system.
The scientists that had the samples had a death date set. There was going to be a celebration afterwards. Then some fools pushed through an injunction to prevent the total and final extinction of smallpox.
By the way, if you don't know, the longer something is around, and the more it's fooled with, the more likely there will be an accident. Smallpox is currently sitting in locked freezers and they don't even like to move the samples around. What do you think will happen when they have to start culturing large quantities of it to start making vaccines? Yep, it's probably going to get loose. (I don't know their current setup, my info on their storage was before they started making limited quantities of the vaccine for certain 'key personnel' in 200X (two thousand something).
If you want to find out more, there are plenty of science articles, even some real video journalism and the like on it, but please avoid the flaky sites out there, especially the conspiracy nut dumps.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
Just another day in Paradise
Very specific, as it's a rather different process than most vaccinations, it's not an injection. They scratch your skin deep enough to draw blood and apply the vaccine to the wound, this then gets to fester for about a week leaving a small scar. Every other one of the dozens of vaccinations I got over my career were injections.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
This is not completely true. In fact, there are large numbers of people in the third world resisting vaccination because people got polio from the oral vaccine.
[citation needed]
From the WHO : http://www.who.int/features/qa...
"What is vaccine-derived polio?"
"Since 2000, more than 10 billion doses of OPV [Oral Polio Vaccine] have been administered to nearly 3 billion children worldwide..... resulting in fewer than 760 VDPV [vaccine-derived poliovirus] cases "
I make that 0.00003%. I'm not particularly scared, and anyone who is is ignorant