Why would it take 6 months when you could just buy 1 dose from China and copy that instead?
A dose of vaccine doesn't get you much that's useful. It should contain two proteins, the HA and NA surface ones, you'd have to "decompile" them, produce DNA sequences that would code for them, use the reverse genetics approach to get the DNA into flu strains optimized to grow in eggs, or insect cells in bioreactors for the Protein Solutions approach (and I know some other companies were working on similar modern approaches)... and then without the real strain it would be harder to gauge efficiency, you'd certainly need many more than a single dose from the PRC.
And all this takes time, and more difficult lab work, when it'll already be too late for 100s of millions to billions of people if an ultra lethal pandemic is raging.
Heck, sneak in and steal a sample, bribe a Chinese person to get one for you.
Shortly after the Obama administration took office the PRC burned our entire network of agents in the country, brutally and publicly executed 10s of them, good luck finding more now.
Or the world could just pay CHina $100-1000 / person for an inoculation.
Most people don't take the annual flu vaccine, so the entire world wouldn't have even vaguely enough production capability. The real hope would be a Maximum Effort to use something like the Protein Sciences insect cells in bioreactors approach, and even then you'd need to conscript a bunch of bioreactors and the people who know how to use them who haven't yet succumbed to the pandemic, and still probably run out of capacity in the purification, testing and bottling steps.
The whole reason to make a fuss now... well, actually it's to score cheap political points against Trump for a problem that started 3 years before he became President, but after that it's the rumor that it's transmitting people to people in the PRC. The whole world needs to start preparing now, before it possibly becomes a pandemic.
If the US government asks nicely, I am sure the government of China will hand over information this time
The US when Obama was president didn't ask nicely from 2013 to 2016? No one else in the world has asked the PRC nicely? The Europeans for example also make flu vaccines, some of their firms are the biggest in the world at doing that, like France's Sanofi. When looking for US seed strain producing labs, I also noted there are 1 or more in the U.K.
And producing seed strains now is one of the most important things that can be done, it normally takes a long time, hybridizing the original strain with ones that grow well in chicken egg membranes so they aren't pathogenic but express the 2 important original strain antigens, which is particularly hard with avian original strains since they tend to attack other bird cells.
Ignore the propaganda slant the NYT put on the issue and focus on a) this being a 2013 strain and b) this being a world wide issue if it breaks out. The PRC is treating this like SARS, it's a political issue were their leaders would rather have 100s of millions to billions of people die than to lose face.
H7N9 is just a general subtype of the influenza A species, here we're talking about a particular strain in the PRC. New strains are generated all the time, especially in the PRC where men, birds and pigs live in very close proximity, and after one of them causes a pandemic, it's subtype generally becomes a or the dominant subtype till there's another pandemic of another subtype. E.g. historically, the 1918 flu was H1N1, and the recent 2009 swine derived flu was also of that subtype. In between, H3N2 for example caused the 1968 pandemic, and became established alongside H1N1 (all this partly from memory and double checked a bit with Wikipedia). There are many, many other type A subtypes.
Or, maybe we could put all of those research grants, and patents they jack prices up for to better use. Instead of allowing a bunch of selfish assholes to demand tribute from the sick.
Yeah, let's kill the Golden Goose, that trick always works!
Seriously, show us on the doll where the capitalist touched you, for you'd rather have millions of people die year in, year out, until, maybe, some day, Western Civilization manages to reappear, that let any one of them "demand tribute from the sick".
You specifically wish me dead, for without these vile profiteers spending billions and billions on drug research and development I'd be dead decades ago, or probably before starting grade school, pretty sure I was prescribed antibiotics for my one bought with pneumonia after playing around in the dirt too energetically. Hmmm, and my father as well, from his current problem, or back around 1950 plus or minus when he was injected every 4 hours with what had to be procaine penicillin to save him from pneumonia. Probably quite a few people you know. And I hope you've never been prescribed an antibiotic for an infection that would have otherwise killed you.
You socialists killed way more than 100 million people in the 20th Century, will you ever be satisfied?
If [the FDA] cared about helping Americans we would be able to buy drugs from Canada still.
If that was allowed, then US drug companies would stop giving Canada's nationalized healthcare system discounts, they can well afford to lose whatever business that would cost for a population of 37 million in favor of the 335 million in the US. Especially seeing as how they and we would like to see them continuing to do drug R&D, which the US market supports since all these other wonderful government single payer systems demand prices just above the cost of goods.
Heh, I don't think Russia or the US would cough those up, certainly not without a very good reason. But I don't think you really need them, the DNA has been sequenced and published (and that was controversial of course), it's thought to be not terribly hard to recreate from that, certainly for a reasonably advanced nation state. One reason after 9/11 we got ourselves back into position to inoculate every one in the country if it broke out.
Deaths are linked to low weight (not enough fat to survive periods where it's a struggle to keep food down, and low energy to power the immune system) and other modern comforts and treatments.
Whoa, I sincerely hope you're correct, and the cytokine storm hypothesis for the lethality of the 1918 pandemic is wrong. Erk, assuming the accounts I've read are correct, how does this explain the 1918 strain preferentially killing the younger? Well, for that, there's the hypothesis that the older set had already survived a strain somewhat close to the 1918 one. And maybe the body weight one fits into it.
Experts say this is a very hard field, a common maxim is, "If you've seen one flu pandemic, you've seen one flu pandemic."
It would be in China's interest to let the US or other countries develop a vaccine as they stand to lose many, many people.
As for the PRC, and North Asian counties in general like Japan, the authorities would rather have millions of their own people die than to lose face. (For the latter country, see WWII, and at smaller scales the responses to the Kobe earthquake and JAL Flight 123.)
"You bet we'd provide the seed strains to grow in eggs to other countie"
Who is "we?" American pharmaceutical companies? I don't think so. Where is the profit in that?
From memory, and what I was just able to look up, there's 3 or so labs in the US that do this, St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, New York Medical College in Westchester County (maybe the top place, or maybe they just get the best press since a woman runs it), and maybe the CDC, all mustache twirling evil non-profit academic labs.
I'd hardly call [the 2014 Ebola outbreak] so routine and easily contained that you can wave it away. There were secondary infections in the U.S. You know, the people that were in freaking Andromeda Strain biohazard containment.
That's because we had so few cases (most in fact health workers evacuated from Africa, right? Was there even more than 1 secondary in the US?) we could actually treat them in the dozen or less beds in the 3 of the 4 facilities that can do this (the 4th was reserved for any healthcare workers in the first 3 who contracted it, which fortunately didn't happen).
If it gets dire in a First World country, you do essentially what the Third World does, pretend to treat it but isolate it, and let the chips fall where they may. Although as we're discovering, survivors can transmit for a long time, so we'd have to get even more strict with quarantine measures.
The point is that, while it wasn't "routine" (except this sort of thing actually is routine in Africa), it wasn't The Big One, more people get killed in a normal flu season, let alone a pandemic one. Because, you know, Ebola is not transmitted by aerosol.
A pandemic that's more like 1918, or worse, is what we're trying to forestall, with the PRC not cooperating at all for the last 5 years. Obviously because they knew Trump would be elected 3 years after it started breaking out in the PRC.
But there is no direct evidence linking China's actions with the trade dispute.
For the PRC and our betters in the US, this has nothing to do with science, medicine, avoiding the possible deaths of 100s of millions to billions of lives, etc., the alpha and omega is politics. The usual stuff the PRC has always done with infectious diseases like SARS, and TDS here.
That's what you get if you don't play nice. Ahwel you can thank Trump for that with his stupid decisions.
It's the PRC that's never, ever played nice with the rest of the world when it comes to infectious diseases, historically one of their most consequential exports, e.g. the Black Death. Look at SARS in 2002 for an archetypal example.
In this case, per the fine article, the PRC has been withholding samples for "over a year", i.e. before the start of the trade war. Because this is a propaganda piece attacking Trump, something you're all too happy to help with, you have to read to note it first showed up in 2013, the year after the Lightworker was reelected. I.e. if you can't find it in yourself to blame the foreign commies, blame Obama before Trump, they've been withholding it for 5 years, as many others in the discussion have noted.
Most countries have to rely on countries with more advanced medical industries. Why would China share valuable knowledge about a virus when it can develop a vaccine itself? If an American pharmaceutical company developed a vaccine based on the samples would everyone in the world be provided the ability to simply copy it free of charge?
Because they wouldn't be able to provide enough vaccine for their own country if it broke out in a big way, unless they've copied approaches like the one used by Protein Sciences?
You bet we'd provide the seed strains to grow in eggs to other counties if a worldwide pandemic broke out killing 100s of millions to billions of people, something we've been fearing since 1918. Of course, we'd first have to create those seed strains, which takes a long time to begin with for non-avian original strains, the avian ones obviously don't play well with chicken egg membranes.
This is why we should be investing more in modernizing flu vaccine manufacturing. If the next super flu is also highly infectious to chickens, they will be culled and burned.
It's also a very slow process, and each egg produces at most 3 doses. I was appalled with 2 'p's when the FDA tried to deny Protein Sciences a licence with the excuse the old methods were good enough. They use modern biotech, splicing the relevant antigen coding DNA into... whatever, insect? cells that grow well in bioreactors to quickly mass produce the antigens, as I recall something like 100,000 doses in each run. Something like what they're doing would be the only real hope if we were facing a true death plague.
it does not refute the fact that this ridiculous trade war is making a bad situation worse.
Citation needed, seeing as how per the report the withholding started before the trade war. If they've been doing it for 5 years as others have claimed, you ought to be blaming Obama for starting it.
If China asked the US for a sample of an infectious disease, would the US give it to China?
Do you have any reason to believe we wouldn't?
My Google and Bing fu wasn't good enough to find anything about this, but I can't recall ever hearing of such a case, we can be sure the usual suspects would scream about it, and there's also the minor detail that mainland China has been one of the biggest sources for novel diseases. Which has been true for a very long time, e.g. the Black Death is thought to have come from China.
Or the world could just pay CHina $100-1000 / person for an inoculation.
What are the odds the inoculations would be any more effective than the zillions of ones made with expired ingredients manufactured by those two PRC companies that are now posing one of the greatest threats to Emperor Xi's reign?
This isn't just China... it is a miracle Ebola didn't spread in the US.
Not really, Ebola, like this bird flue, is zoonotic, it's not adapted to us humans and kills us way too fast to spread widely and quickly, especially with minimum levels of isolation that e.g. Nigeria was capable of implementing.
A bird flu like this might be much worse, though, since it's spread by aerosols... but it also might no be as easily caught by humans... except if the PRC is doing their usual thing of trying to sweep cases under the rug, they're giving it a chance to adapt better to humans (e.g. hybridization when a human or pig gets both it and a normal to them strain of the flu), although that could decrease its lethality.
If US pharma ends up charging them more than they can afford
If this turns out to be the next break out super-flu like the 1918 variety, every egg laying chicken in the world will be conscripted by every company in the world that can make flu vaccines so we maybe keep the death toll in the mere 100s of millions.
In the meanwhile, it's vital that the few research labs capable of mutating raw flu strains into ones that express the vital proteins while growing well in egg membranes get going. Especially since this is particularly difficult with avian flu strains, they're much more vicious towards chicken eggs.
The PRC has never "played well with others" when it comes to infectious diseases, their first instinct is to claim nothing is happening, see SARS, they exclude the ROC (Taiwan) from as much of the international health network as they can, it's what you expect from a government were politics trumps (heh) everything else, especially including human lives. They don't much care if they kill their own Han Chinese by the tens of millions, why would even they care about foreign devils?
If, as you claim, they're doing this to spite Trump, that just further proves that they always put politics ahead of human lives.
An Anonymous Coward in this post covers most of the ground, although to clarify one point, packet switching was developed for survivablity, later the ARPANET for sharing scarce and precious computer resources for research the government was paying for.
That said, anything that prevents Oracle from bidding on this contract is fine by me, they and Google with its allergy towards defense contracting are the only vendors who should not be in the running. They also only have tiny slices of the market, while as of last year AWS had 47% and Azure 11% of the market.
Although, is this, in AWS terms, an issue of geographic separation between availability zones or regions?
What has become quite obvious recently is that add-ons for Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers (not sure about web browsers) should never be be trusted
For myself I've been using this workaround: I have a Firefox profile with all sorts of add-ons for my daily life and a I have a separate profile for banking which only has uBlock Origin installed - nothing else.
I do the same sort of thing, but I don't even trust uBlock Origin for my profile for all financial transactions, including ordering stuff. Sure, I generally trust it (plus uMatrix), but so do so many other people, and it's a very big target as a result. I don't see a great need for it, as I only launch that profile for a single site's interaction, and then exit before going to another site. But I do grant your implicit point that some financial sites out there are badly constructed and uBlock Origin might prevent a problem.
I believe that if California did not have such great weather that they'd have gone bankrupt a long time ago by now.
A likely bigger factor is that non-competes are unenforceable in California. In the Bay area, this has produced the world's biggest liquid talent pool for developing software.
When flight simulators were first invented, instructors thought that they were useless because nothing can replace actual flight hours.
When was this? Because they were held to be really valuable during WWII, and Project Whirlwind, which started during the war and created among many things core memory and the idea of the minicomputer, began as a project to build a particularly flexible flight simulator for the Navy (the flexibility is what led to them to using a digital computer, and to develop a new class of them to drive it).
The derision for that Apple ad was in part because we didn't expect such K-12 education programs to show such variability, and the obvious issue that they simply can't simulate things in 3D (this was long before VR), which is something a flight simulator actually does in a manner identical to how it's experienced in a real cockpit, minus the effects of crashing, real G forces and the like of course.
Slashdot Mirror
A dose of vaccine doesn't get you much that's useful. It should contain two proteins, the HA and NA surface ones, you'd have to "decompile" them, produce DNA sequences that would code for them, use the reverse genetics approach to get the DNA into flu strains optimized to grow in eggs, or insect cells in bioreactors for the Protein Solutions approach (and I know some other companies were working on similar modern approaches) ... and then without the real strain it would be harder to gauge efficiency, you'd certainly need many more than a single dose from the PRC.
And all this takes time, and more difficult lab work, when it'll already be too late for 100s of millions to billions of people if an ultra lethal pandemic is raging.
Shortly after the Obama administration took office the PRC burned our entire network of agents in the country, brutally and publicly executed 10s of them, good luck finding more now.
Most people don't take the annual flu vaccine, so the entire world wouldn't have even vaguely enough production capability. The real hope would be a Maximum Effort to use something like the Protein Sciences insect cells in bioreactors approach, and even then you'd need to conscript a bunch of bioreactors and the people who know how to use them who haven't yet succumbed to the pandemic, and still probably run out of capacity in the purification, testing and bottling steps.
The whole reason to make a fuss now ... well, actually it's to score cheap political points against Trump for a problem that started 3 years before he became President, but after that it's the rumor that it's transmitting people to people in the PRC. The whole world needs to start preparing now , before it possibly becomes a pandemic.
The US when Obama was president didn't ask nicely from 2013 to 2016? No one else in the world has asked the PRC nicely? The Europeans for example also make flu vaccines, some of their firms are the biggest in the world at doing that, like France's Sanofi. When looking for US seed strain producing labs, I also noted there are 1 or more in the U.K.
And producing seed strains now is one of the most important things that can be done, it normally takes a long time, hybridizing the original strain with ones that grow well in chicken egg membranes so they aren't pathogenic but express the 2 important original strain antigens, which is particularly hard with avian original strains since they tend to attack other bird cells.
Ignore the propaganda slant the NYT put on the issue and focus on a) this being a 2013 strain and b) this being a world wide issue if it breaks out. The PRC is treating this like SARS, it's a political issue were their leaders would rather have 100s of millions to billions of people die than to lose face.
Just like the 1918, 1976 (Ford's swine flu), 1977 (best guess from a Russian biolab), and 2009 H1N1 strains were "the same exact shit"? And the annual Northern hemisphere vaccine strains were Brisbane/59/2007 before the 2009 pandemic, then for it and many following years California/7/2009, and then last year Michigan/45/2015?
You know nothing about the science.
Like Google dropping their Don't be evil shtick, you won't find the word "nerd" on the front page, the About page, or the FAQ.
H7N9 is just a general subtype of the influenza A species, here we're talking about a particular strain in the PRC. New strains are generated all the time, especially in the PRC where men, birds and pigs live in very close proximity, and after one of them causes a pandemic, it's subtype generally becomes a or the dominant subtype till there's another pandemic of another subtype. E.g. historically, the 1918 flu was H1N1, and the recent 2009 swine derived flu was also of that subtype. In between, H3N2 for example caused the 1968 pandemic, and became established alongside H1N1 (all this partly from memory and double checked a bit with Wikipedia). There are many, many other type A subtypes.
Yeah, let's kill the Golden Goose, that trick always works!
Seriously, show us on the doll where the capitalist touched you, for you'd rather have millions of people die year in, year out, until, maybe, some day, Western Civilization manages to reappear, that let any one of them "demand tribute from the sick".
You specifically wish me dead, for without these vile profiteers spending billions and billions on drug research and development I'd be dead decades ago, or probably before starting grade school, pretty sure I was prescribed antibiotics for my one bought with pneumonia after playing around in the dirt too energetically. Hmmm, and my father as well, from his current problem, or back around 1950 plus or minus when he was injected every 4 hours with what had to be procaine penicillin to save him from pneumonia. Probably quite a few people you know. And I hope you've never been prescribed an antibiotic for an infection that would have otherwise killed you.
You socialists killed way more than 100 million people in the 20th Century, will you ever be satisfied?
If that was allowed, then US drug companies would stop giving Canada's nationalized healthcare system discounts, they can well afford to lose whatever business that would cost for a population of 37 million in favor of the 335 million in the US. Especially seeing as how they and we would like to see them continuing to do drug R&D, which the US market supports since all these other wonderful government single payer systems demand prices just above the cost of goods.
Heh, I don't think Russia or the US would cough those up, certainly not without a very good reason. But I don't think you really need them, the DNA has been sequenced and published (and that was controversial of course), it's thought to be not terribly hard to recreate from that, certainly for a reasonably advanced nation state. One reason after 9/11 we got ourselves back into position to inoculate every one in the country if it broke out.
Whoa, I sincerely hope you're correct, and the cytokine storm hypothesis for the lethality of the 1918 pandemic is wrong. Erk, assuming the accounts I've read are correct, how does this explain the 1918 strain preferentially killing the younger? Well, for that, there's the hypothesis that the older set had already survived a strain somewhat close to the 1918 one. And maybe the body weight one fits into it.
Experts say this is a very hard field, a common maxim is, "If you've seen one flu pandemic, you've seen one flu pandemic."
As for the PRC, and North Asian counties in general like Japan, the authorities would rather have millions of their own people die than to lose face. (For the latter country, see WWII, and at smaller scales the responses to the Kobe earthquake and JAL Flight 123.)
From memory, and what I was just able to look up, there's 3 or so labs in the US that do this, St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, New York Medical College in Westchester County (maybe the top place, or maybe they just get the best press since a woman runs it), and maybe the CDC, all mustache twirling evil non-profit academic labs.
Your worldview is severely stunted and parochial.
That's because we had so few cases (most in fact health workers evacuated from Africa, right? Was there even more than 1 secondary in the US?) we could actually treat them in the dozen or less beds in the 3 of the 4 facilities that can do this (the 4th was reserved for any healthcare workers in the first 3 who contracted it, which fortunately didn't happen).
If it gets dire in a First World country, you do essentially what the Third World does, pretend to treat it but isolate it, and let the chips fall where they may. Although as we're discovering, survivors can transmit for a long time, so we'd have to get even more strict with quarantine measures.
The point is that, while it wasn't "routine" (except this sort of thing actually is routine in Africa), it wasn't The Big One, more people get killed in a normal flu season, let alone a pandemic one. Because, you know, Ebola is not transmitted by aerosol.
A pandemic that's more like 1918, or worse, is what we're trying to forestall, with the PRC not cooperating at all for the last 5 years. Obviously because they knew Trump would be elected 3 years after it started breaking out in the PRC.
For the PRC and our betters in the US, this has nothing to do with science, medicine, avoiding the possible deaths of 100s of millions to billions of lives, etc., the alpha and omega is politics. The usual stuff the PRC has always done with infectious diseases like SARS, and TDS here.
It's the PRC that's never, ever played nice with the rest of the world when it comes to infectious diseases, historically one of their most consequential exports, e.g. the Black Death. Look at SARS in 2002 for an archetypal example.
In this case, per the fine article, the PRC has been withholding samples for "over a year", i.e. before the start of the trade war. Because this is a propaganda piece attacking Trump, something you're all too happy to help with, you have to read to note it first showed up in 2013, the year after the Lightworker was reelected. I.e. if you can't find it in yourself to blame the foreign commies, blame Obama before Trump, they've been withholding it for 5 years, as many others in the discussion have noted.
Because they wouldn't be able to provide enough vaccine for their own country if it broke out in a big way, unless they've copied approaches like the one used by Protein Sciences?
You bet we'd provide the seed strains to grow in eggs to other counties if a worldwide pandemic broke out killing 100s of millions to billions of people, something we've been fearing since 1918. Of course, we'd first have to create those seed strains, which takes a long time to begin with for non-avian original strains, the avian ones obviously don't play well with chicken egg membranes.
It's also a very slow process, and each egg produces at most 3 doses. I was appalled with 2 'p's when the FDA tried to deny Protein Sciences a licence with the excuse the old methods were good enough. They use modern biotech, splicing the relevant antigen coding DNA into ... whatever, insect? cells that grow well in bioreactors to quickly mass produce the antigens, as I recall something like 100,000 doses in each run. Something like what they're doing would be the only real hope if we were facing a true death plague.
Citation needed, seeing as how per the report the withholding started before the trade war. If they've been doing it for 5 years as others have claimed, you ought to be blaming Obama for starting it.
Do you have any reason to believe we wouldn't?
My Google and Bing fu wasn't good enough to find anything about this, but I can't recall ever hearing of such a case, we can be sure the usual suspects would scream about it, and there's also the minor detail that mainland China has been one of the biggest sources for novel diseases. Which has been true for a very long time, e.g. the Black Death is thought to have come from China.
What are the odds the inoculations would be any more effective than the zillions of ones made with expired ingredients manufactured by those two PRC companies that are now posing one of the greatest threats to Emperor Xi's reign?
Not really, Ebola, like this bird flue, is zoonotic, it's not adapted to us humans and kills us way too fast to spread widely and quickly, especially with minimum levels of isolation that e.g. Nigeria was capable of implementing.
A bird flu like this might be much worse, though, since it's spread by aerosols ... but it also might no be as easily caught by humans ... except if the PRC is doing their usual thing of trying to sweep cases under the rug, they're giving it a chance to adapt better to humans (e.g. hybridization when a human or pig gets both it and a normal to them strain of the flu), although that could decrease its lethality.
If this turns out to be the next break out super-flu like the 1918 variety, every egg laying chicken in the world will be conscripted by every company in the world that can make flu vaccines so we maybe keep the death toll in the mere 100s of millions.
In the meanwhile, it's vital that the few research labs capable of mutating raw flu strains into ones that express the vital proteins while growing well in egg membranes get going. Especially since this is particularly difficult with avian flu strains, they're much more vicious towards chicken eggs.
The PRC has never "played well with others" when it comes to infectious diseases, their first instinct is to claim nothing is happening, see SARS, they exclude the ROC (Taiwan) from as much of the international health network as they can, it's what you expect from a government were politics trumps (heh) everything else, especially including human lives. They don't much care if they kill their own Han Chinese by the tens of millions, why would even they care about foreign devils?
If, as you claim, they're doing this to spite Trump, that just further proves that they always put politics ahead of human lives.
An Anonymous Coward in this post covers most of the ground, although to clarify one point, packet switching was developed for survivablity, later the ARPANET for sharing scarce and precious computer resources for research the government was paying for.
That said, anything that prevents Oracle from bidding on this contract is fine by me, they and Google with its allergy towards defense contracting are the only vendors who should not be in the running. They also only have tiny slices of the market, while as of last year AWS had 47% and Azure 11% of the market.
Although, is this, in AWS terms, an issue of geographic separation between availability zones or regions?
I do the same sort of thing, but I don't even trust uBlock Origin for my profile for all financial transactions, including ordering stuff. Sure, I generally trust it (plus uMatrix), but so do so many other people, and it's a very big target as a result. I don't see a great need for it, as I only launch that profile for a single site's interaction, and then exit before going to another site. But I do grant your implicit point that some financial sites out there are badly constructed and uBlock Origin might prevent a problem.
A likely bigger factor is that non-competes are unenforceable in California. In the Bay area, this has produced the world's biggest liquid talent pool for developing software.
When was this? Because they were held to be really valuable during WWII, and Project Whirlwind, which started during the war and created among many things core memory and the idea of the minicomputer, began as a project to build a particularly flexible flight simulator for the Navy (the flexibility is what led to them to using a digital computer, and to develop a new class of them to drive it).
The derision for that Apple ad was in part because we didn't expect such K-12 education programs to show such variability, and the obvious issue that they simply can't simulate things in 3D (this was long before VR), which is something a flight simulator actually does in a manner identical to how it's experienced in a real cockpit, minus the effects of crashing, real G forces and the like of course.