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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?
It could be highly useful in future medical research, and the damage it could cause if it gets back into the wild would be minimal.
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?
Even if you eliminate all the stocks you know about there's still the stocks you don't know about, if it ever gets out it probably came from a forgotten sample.
I don't think it's a huge deal either way but if we want to understand how a truly nasty virus works then you can't really do it without a really nasty virus to study.
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Why Don't Scientists Kill The 'Demon In The Freezer'?
Because this isn't Resident Evil or some stupid Hollywood movie?
Elok
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.
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
This is the one I have to wonder about.
The vaccine for smallpox is not smallpox, It is vaccinia which is closely related to cowpox.
If someone releases smallpox and you need to vaccinate, then you still don't need to have any smallpox.
If someone makes a new type of smallpox and releases it, then you want the new smallpox to develop a defense against and test and now you have it from the infected people.
And it seems unlikely that the old smallpox (deadly) would be used to make a vaccine against any new smallpox, but I admit the possibility.
Smallpox is a member of the poxviridae family. If you need a virus like smallpox to fool around with in your lab, there are 28 genera and 69 species of pox.
On the other hand, smallpox is not the only disease we have eradicated.
Rinderpest is the other. Rinderpest is closely related to measles and measles probably evolved from rinderpest.
Stocks of Rinderpest remain, but rinderpest vaccine is made from a rinderpest virus variant, so it makes sense that we would keep some of that for just in case.
The biggest risk is from someone accidently releasing it from unknown/unmanaged sources or from an intentional release for malicious purposes, in either case destroying what you know about doesn't help. You never know what the future may bring, perhaps smallpox will be the source of a vaccine for an as yet unknown variant. If we can't possibly keep it safely stored then we are fucked anyway as there are a shitload more deadly diseases that we haven't fully eradicated yet that we also need to store to do research on.
sequence it's genome, then destroy all samples of it. If some criminal mastermind breaks out a new strain of it, you culture the strain from the unfortunte souls who have been infected and fight it off with by comparing it to the sequence of the original strain.
If we ever get to the point that we can reconstruct any virus from the digitized sequences, then we've got way bigger problems on our hands than smallpox.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This is one of them...
Now that being said... stockpiles of the live virus should not be kept very many places and there needs to be a "destroy plan" in the event these locations become compromised. (such as war, civil unrest, the end of the world, etc.)
Perhaps in the US, UK, France, Russia, and China... Each nation can have stored samples of the virus in known locations under guard.
For the same reason we'll never really get rid of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, or anything else, there is a greater than non-zero value to having them. But we don't need "lots" of them.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of whether or not a virus is 'life' -- this question would apply to a bacterial disease as well -- how is this any different than the attempts in the last century to eradicate the North American wolf? They were dangerous (and quite inconvenient) to humans. Thankfully (to some...) we failed, and many people are happy they are returning. The reasons we wanted them gone haven't changed (although hardly as much an issue with the hugely reduced numbers).
If it's not OK to eradicate a species that looks like the family dog, what about if they were squirrel-sized? Insects? Where's the line, exactly, where we say 'OK, on this side, it's good and right to completely remove this species from existence, but on the other side of the line, it's a 'protected species' to be preserved, and we just control it? One could argue that wolves served a purpose in the ecosystem by controlling deer and other game population -- but honestly, we will never allow the grey wolf population to grow to a number to have any real effect on that anymore.
Not really taking a side on whether or not to eliminate the stocks we have of smallpox, but I feel like there certainly is an ethical question in whether or not it's OK to do so.
(As a side note, I think 'genocide' only applies to killing humans, but you get the idea, I'm sure)
If I'm not back again this time tomorrow...
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.
They don't just have scabs.
According to the source, they had railroad tanker cars.
Not of V. minor and V. major, but the "heated up" versions of the two.
That...is an awful lot of virus to dispose of. And it's not something you can just let your average grunt hook up to a drain hose, either. You have to use highly-trained and supremely-qualified personnel, who are going to know exactly what they're dealing with.
Highly-trained and supremely-qualified personnel who haven't seen a paycheck in months, aren't likely to see one any time soon, and know how much money other governments would be willing to pay for a cardboard box with a few vials.
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I'm feeding a troll here, but you know that the earliest "vaccine" for smallpox was.... smallpox. The fatality rate for that method, called variolation, was on the order of 1-2% and there are records of intentional smallpox infection to induce immunity going back to at least 1500. The first real vaccine was infection by cowpox and was introduced in 1796. I imagine your dates are a bit cherry picked, but the Jenner vaccine wouldn't have reached places like India and China immediately so I suspect they still used variolation at least for a while. A 2% death rate if enough people were "vaccinated" that way would drive up the death toll for that crappy vaccine but is still better than something like 35% death rates for natural infections.
and only 'Hollywood' thinking leads to the idea that there could be some global agreement to destroy it all. Anybody who thinks that nation-states with official-secrets regimes would actually destroy all of their samples is a special kind of stupid.
The article is as meaningful as asking why scientists don't simply block gravity - all available evidence points to the idea being impossible.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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