Ever wonder what a country waging a grinding siege war could do with a plague lab?
That’s keeping me up. Threaten nukes and deploy the plague to show you aren’t kidding.
There was a news story yesterday about the Ukrainian government using drones to airlift medicine to occupied territories that have been cut off from pharmaceutical supply chains (the occupation forces said they would figure it out, but didn’t)
There's a reason the US and Soviets were largely willing to get rid of the stuff - it's fairly useless geopolitically, because you mostly can't target it.
It can definitely be targeted: behind enemy lines, or in the occupied territory with selective access to antibiotics. Population migration can be enforced coercively too.
This is the same regime pulling stunts like this [0] and threatening nuclear war, absolutely would not be surprised.
[0] https://www.occrp.org/en/news/putins-chef-sends-bloody-sledg...
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/scientists-behind-paper-...
Remember all the theater around wearing your mask to your restaurant table and then taking it off for your entire meal in an enclosed room with dozens of other people? Or shutting down public parks and beaches but excusing BLM protests because they agreed with their politics?
The Trump admin was cartoonishly inept but the public health experts did plenty to kill their own credibility as well.
> If all states had imposed restrictions similar to those used in the 10 most restrictive states, excess deaths would have been an estimated 10% to 21% lower than the 1.18 million that actually occurred during the 2-year analysis period; conversely, the estimates suggest counterfactual increases of 13% to 17% if all states had restrictions similar to those in the 10 least-restrictive states. The estimated strong vs weak state restriction difference was 271 000 to 447 000 deaths, with behavior changes associated with 49% to 79% of the overall disparity.
The paper you linked also doesn't take into account economic impacts, which aren't negligible, and lead to deaths of despair, drug abuse, unaffordable housing, etc.. They also admit the school closures were ineffective and unnecessary and we've seen the mental health and educational impacts on kids and now young adults that had those years taken from them.
Keep in mind also that the favorite phrase of the COVID era was "abundance of caution." That's itself a tacit admission that they knew their recommendations went too far and they weren't putting enough weight on the secondary effects.
I find it strange you bemoan the public health establishment's credibility when your own source shows that people following its guidelines played a greater role in saving hundreds of thousands of lives than legal mandates.
I had forgot about that. God what a ridiculous time, my county judge Clay Jenkins in Dallas would drive around yelling at people walking their dogs to get inside. He was overjoyed with his little hobby authoritative regime. During the pandemic, I met him at a fundraiser once where, gasp, no one was wearing masks (it was very fancy). I was going to ask him about it but my wife's friend who was putting it on just asked me to leave.
The truth is the CDC and broader public-health apparatus were not starved of money; they performed badly despite substantial resources. The CDC botched its initial COVID test, their systems were antiquated, guidance was wildly inconsistent, and the agency later reorganized itself after acknowledging major operational failures.
This is the successor state to the country that thought it could hide a cloud of nuclear fallout.
Treating that low number like a low number is not "discounting" rural US citizens. The US - all populations included - does not really live with the hantavirus in any real sense. It's incredibly rare. 10x as many people are struck by lightening annually in the US.
It is an incredibly rare disease, so it is hardly something that would qualify as “endemic” to any population in the US. Rural populations in the US do not feel it like rural populations in many other countries. Acknowledging that is not discounting or forgetting rural populations in the US. That is not a fair accusation in the slightest.
For example, Gene Hackman's wife, Betsy Arakawa, famously died from hantavirus. They lived in a wealthy gated community in Santa Fe.
Every single one of the people infected by COVID has been contaminated by someone around them.
(It wasn't true of the plague during the great pandemics, as it was also borne by rats and their poop)
Perhaps the Russian military is overreacting with the blanket quarantines, but the odds are more likely that they understand the nature better than anyone else.
Again, normal pneumonic plague approaches 100% fatality rates. This is potentially a weaponized form.
This is an "oh, fuck" moment.
The reason we've haven't had more outbreaks of more diseases in the last century is because we had a lot of smart vigilant well-resourced people who very much felt the disease was the problem, and took steps to mitigate.
Classic late-stage civilization blunder is taking the fruits of civilization for granted. Sorry you're not aware of those things, but that's on you.
Yea you are definitely right about that. In Africa (specific countries I can’t currently recall) attempts at vaccination programs for example are often met with hostility or suspicion or even some people believing a vaccine causes the disease.
There was also vaccine skepticism during the COVID-19 pandemic in countries like China which refused first-to-market western vaccines out of fear and suspicion. It’s tragic all around.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/09/06/1034631928/the-cias-hunt-for-...
Also stop trying to deprive other people and governments of their agency just because it fits a convenient western superiority complex you have. They’re not stupid.
blaming the ~260M citizens for the actions of Pakistani government is repulsive.
Sorry. People are responsible for the governments they have. Everyone is, or nobody is.
Those 260 million Pakistanis can educate themselves on vaccines and make informed decisions. Vaccine denial in the US? Same thing. You can’t say Americans are responsible for anti-vax sentiments, for example, and then say other people around the world aren’t.
Or are Americans smarter and better than everyone else and so they’re more responsible? I’ll happily take you admitting we’re the best if you want to go that route.
For example I think Iranians should be privileged to speak out against their repressive government without fear of being hung. Pakistanis aren’t privileged and can’t speak out against their government harboring Bin Laden? Someone should fix that so they are are able to speak out against that, right?
Regardless, being poor doesn’t make one stupid or uneducated. Many Americans who are anti-vax are also poor by American standards, but I don’t think it matters. You can’t have your cake and eat it too here.
In a democracy, yes. Pakistan however is a democracy only in distant theory, pretty much everyone sane calls it an authoritarian regime [1].
And no, in the age of guns and nuclear weapons, we can't go and blame a country's people for its government. I don't blame Gazan civilians for Hamas, I don't blame Iranian civilians for the Mullahs, I don't blame Chinese peasants for the CCP and I don't blame ordinary Russians for Putin. These people do not have a choice - either openly (e.g. China) or in practice (Pakistan, Russia, Iran).
> Those 260 million Pakistanis can educate themselves on vaccines and make informed decisions.
Pakistanis, especially in rural areas, are barely literate [2], and we're talking basic literacy here. Informed decisions require the ability to both access and understand relevant information.
> Or are Americans smarter and better than everyone else and so they’re more responsible?
Americans (as a whole) are at least better suited. On average they are far more literate, they got actual schools, they have reasonably free elections. Yes, the US democracy is flawed (FPTP and gerrymandering basically rendering the votes of swaths of people irrelevant, billionaires manipulating media coverage, ICE and other government organisations being used for voter suppression), but the US still is miles ahead of Pakistan or virtually all "third world" countries.
No I reject this and neo-liberal views of the world. That’s the mental model that got us into the Iraq debacle. What follows is that this becomes a problem (authoritarianism) that needs to be corrected “spread democracy”.
> These people do not have a choice - either openly (e.g. China) or in practice (Pakistan, Russia, Iran).
There is always a choice. Democracies weren’t inherent in the world but had to be fought for. They need to fight for their rights. Or not. It’s their responsibility.
> Pakistanis, especially in rural areas, are barely literate [2], and we're talking basic literacy here. Informed decisions require the ability to both access and understand relevant information.
Same was true during the age of European colonialism. “We must christianize them and educate them”. &c &c
> Americans (as a whole) are at least better suited.
As long as you agree Americans are better and exceptional I can’t really argue against you here.
Well for once the neoliberals were correct. In fact, the idea of "universal human rights" was a direct lesson out of 1933-1945, and Article 21 [1] directly specifies everyone's right to take part in government.
A right however is only worth more than the paper it's written on as long as it is enforced, and kleptocrats don't tend to hand over their ill-gotten power willingly.
> There is always a choice. Democracies weren’t inherent in the world but had to be fought for. They need to fight for their rights. Or not.
Which the Iranians did, and tens of thousands were slaughtered just this very year while the rest of the world watched. Or many Arab countries that had their version of "Arab Spring". Or the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine that was a direct, if late, consequence of the Maidan revolution.
> It’s their responsibility.
It's ours as well. There's this infamous line you see every time you run "sudo" in a terminal: "With great power comes great responsibility". We, us Western nations, have power, and lots of it - but we are not using it the way we should, we instead are using it mostly to make money.
> As long as you agree Americans are better and exceptional I can’t really argue against you here.
I'm German, and for what it's worth "American Exceptionalism" is a whole lot of bollocks (because guess what, objectively compared Americans are so much worse off in many metrics it isn't even funny any more, just tragic). Doesn't change my (decently sourced) facts.
[1] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
That Bin Laden operation was so insanely short-sighted in the use of a vaccine program for spying. Completely erodes trust where it should never have eroded, and rightfully contributed to antivax mentality, not just in Pakistan, but also in the US. "Trust us, we're doctors" means nothing.
I like a win. But a clean win is worth being proud of. It would actually be really cool not to shoot yourself in the foot, I think.
If they’re not responsible then everyone else gets to claim not being responsible for the actions of their governments too.
In the USA too. Just look at all the nonsense around the MMR vaccine in Trump's orbit and what's happened to the CDC and FDA under RFK's leadership
In Europe’s defense, which is a very broad thing to speak of anyway, they had a vaccine either already there or close enough so why give Putin any credence when you could wait just a little bit longer?
It's very hard to trust something coming out of their system. It's something inherited from the USSR.
Apparently this isn't even being reported in the news in Russia, just in the local news.
Or for example, Trump as president sent COVID tests for Putin, when the pandemic started, in secret. Why?
Hemorrhagic fevers (including Ebola), for example, are incredibly deadly but that really limits their ability to spread. You still have to be diligent but there's a reason why Ebola has been contained to parts of Africa the the virus seemingly spreads from animals to humans every now and again, starting another local outbreak. But it's never spread globally and it's unlikely to.
Probably the last comparable disease to Covid was the Spanish flu in terms of its ability to spread and that was over 100 years ago. It's worth noting that the Spanish flu could also spread asymptomatically, which also explains it's impact to a large degree. Pretty much every modern influenza variant is a derivative of the Spanish flu, which also tells you something about what tends to happen to novel diseases.
Y pestus is a bacteria, not a virus. We now have antibiotics that could likely combat it, which was obviously something that didn't exist in medieval Europe. Back then it wasn't at all clear that diseases spread by microorganisms at all. Plus, rodents were key to that spread and that's a far smaller problem now.
The nightmare scenario is probably some deadly variant of measles because measles is so incredibly contagious, probably more than any other disease I can think of. It can survive airborne for a very long time and in the modern era we've traced outbreaks of tens of thousands of cases to one single person. But the ability of measles to survive outside a host is also (luckily) incredibly rare.
I'm reminded of the pronghorn antelope, a herbivore that evolved fast speed to avoid a predator that no longer exists, a cat having died out 7000+ years ago. It still has that speed but it has a real cost to their metabolism and their need to constantly eat. at some point they're going to lose that if it's not reinforced by some new predator or other evolutionary advantage.
The problem is, for most of the multiresistant species we don't have anything we can use in the 50 years we need to wait for one resistance to be outcompeted. And we haven't discovered any major new class of agents in decades as we cut back foundational research, which makes the situation worse - we don't just have substances, we don't have the pipeline to develop substances.
Sure, for bacteria we got phage therapy, but we lost a lot of the knowledge there during the collapse of the USSR, not all bacteria are suitable for phage usage, phages have their own side effects (including our immune system attacking the phages as well), and we have mRNA based vaccines but these act too late (when the patient has already caught the pathogen) and are useless in immunosuppressed patients such as organ transplant receivers and some cancer patients.
Not really. While it was true for much of the last century that many “seasonal flu” viruses were direct descendents from H1N1 Spanish flu, the H1N1 that caused the 2009 “swine flu” pandemic was a distinct strain combining new genes of pig, avian, and human flu origins. Since then, derivatives of that virus have replaced earlier ones as the most common circulating H1N1 types.
And right now the most common circulating influenza is actually H3N2 from a completely different (avian) lineage with origins in the 1968 pandemic.
> The reemergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens.19,31
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322
This explanation is now printed uncontroversially in major journals, though at the time the WHO rejected it:
> Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bullwho...
Why pneumonic plague? Pneumonic plague is the form of infection that occurs when plague bacteria are inhaled in aerosolized form into the lungs, or when septicemic plague (plague in the bloodstreams) reaches the lungs. Like, for example, when a test tube breaks. Her method of infection was a pretty textbook vector for pneumonic plague. Other cases have been caused when tissue samples of infected rodents have been splayed open, for example, or when blood from an infected person splatters the respiratory tract. Plague bacteria spreads pretty poorly otherwise, which is why the main vector for bubonic plague is flea bites.
It’s bacteria, antibiotics work more generally than vaccines for viruses do.
There are of course, antibiotic resistant bacteria but we still have some exotic antibiotics in our arsenal.
If anything for a widespread bacterial plague I’d be more concerned about our ability to produce enough antibiotics rather than _if_ we could develop a cure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_prog...
>"When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague," says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, "we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way... to make you want to go out and socialize... this was some horrifying stuff."
> . . .
> Former assistant secretary of defense Andy Weber agrees. "I grew up thinking Reagan’s phrase ‘Evil Empire’ was an exaggeration," he tells us. "Then I learned what the Russians were doing [with biological warfare]." He pauses for effect. "It was evil."
The accounts are from Annie Jacobsen's notes in "Biological War".
(the link is a translation to Russian, I was unable to find the original text in English)
Also consider that toxoplasma changes rat's dopamine serum level to such extent that they stop fearing cats. The same happens with humans, changes in dopamine serum level are so profound that toxoplasma-infected people become more appealing than regular people.
And people take her seriously?
Where was this claimed? Do we have any definitive confirmation of the Roswell incident anyway?
https://web.archive.org/web/20110713153629/https://www.washi...
The engineers were told that the children were rumored to have been kidnapped by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi madman who, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, was known to have performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures mostly on children, dwarfs, and twins. The engineers learned that just before the war ended, Josef Mengele made a deal with Stalin. Stalin offered Mengele an opportunity to continue work in eugenics. . . . in secret, in the Soviet Union.
Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain and provided Stalin with the child-size crew. . . .
What makes one socialize is dopamine [1]: "Hypomania, manifesting with feelings of euphoria, omnipotence, or grandiosity are prone to appear in those moments when medication (dopaminergic medication - thesz) effects are at their maximum."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine_dysregulation_syndrom...
This dopamine dysregulation occurs naturally in people with toxoplasmosis.
This kind of mistake - mistaking dopamine and endorphine, - strongly suggests a fake. I know of one such fake from the former employee of my friend, you can read his account here [2]. My friend was a lead of the "secret" laboratory (next to Kitay Gorod metro station in the center of Moscow, in an institute that needed no documents to enter) that researched how "psychics" and "healers" achieve their results.
[2] https://lit.lib.ru/t/torin_a/text_0100.shtml (it is in Russian, but language is not a barrier at all nowadays)
The laboratory researched what these "extrasensing people" do and found nothing - given very little training an ordinary men can do the same and even better. At the end of USSR, there was a string of visitors from USA there in the lab, and one of those visitors successfully persuaded US government to open similar research program, according to [2].
The fearmongering of "endorphin-producing bugs that make one socialize and spread" looks like, well, fearmongering to obtain funds for Big Pharma's government contracts, etc. It messes up two very different neurotransmitters, a mistake that real scientist would not make.
Before I clicked that link I had never heard of Breaking Points, a political series with over 2MM subscribers. I'm a YT premium subscriber and watch a ton of political stuff, much of it damn similar to what that channel produces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonic_plague
> Former head of the national public health agency Rospotrebnadzor stated that the disease the researcher died of is "most likely not the plague, but even if confirmed, there will be no spread of this disease
Very reassuring.
But isn't the 24 hour critical window of treatment measured from the onset of symptoms?
Pneumonic is the most transmissible. There are also no commercially-available vaccines for it in most countries. That's why this is worth paying attention to. Not reacting. But keeping a close eye on. Russia being Russia we'll probably only learn if containment was lost from Mongolia or China.
'The “young adult male” died eight hours after he was admitted to the hospital, where doctors initially suspected he had hantavirus disease or bacterial pneumonia. Post-mortem testing confirmed Y pestis presence in his blood and lung tissue. It's Arizona’s first pneumonic plague death since 2007.'
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/plague/cdc-reminds-doctors-southw...
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calls Vladimir Putin “patient zero” of global wars spreading: “He must be denied the space to act and the space to spread this evil further.”
- Taylor Swift announces surprise new single: “Patient Zero”
a) why are we comparing treated death rates with untreated death rates?
b) COVID got significantly less deadly as it evolved, which is a known phenomenon that should also apply to this plague
c) that link hijacked my back button, I don't appreciate that >:-(
No, it isn't a known phenomenon, and no, that isn't what happened.
Transmissibility and virulence are actually linked.
Delta was more transmissible and was more deadly, not less. Omicron was also highly transmissible and highly deadly.
Viral replication is also linked to both transmissibility and virulence, and that also increased with Delta and Omicron.
The headlines that Omicron was less virulent were falsified when Omicron hit Taiwan (a largely immune-naive elderly population) and was every bit as deadly as Delta was.
What happened to make later strains less deadly was the evolution of the human immune system since pretty much everyone became vaccinated or recovered and acquired T-cells that would recognize later strains.
The virus only "cares" if it becomes so virulent that it kills you before it spreads. The way that COVID kills, long after the presymptomatic shedding period, after several weeks, doesn't matter--you can dial it up and make that worse, and you won't prevent the virus from spreading.
> a) why are we comparing treated death rates with untreated death rates?
Even when treated (and treatment has to be within 24 hours) the death rate for pneumonic plague is still 17%. Better than 100%, but still nightmare fuel, especially given that the treatment has to be administered almost immediately or it will be ineffective and you're back to the 100% case fatality rate.
The quicker it is, the less it spreads.
Has this got a name?
> It remains unclear how she became unwell.
That's some fine reporting right there.
Patient zero died 4-5 days ago after being infected for about a week (likely infected Sept 25th).
There are probably already clear answers to some of these questions, but that doesn't mean the public will get them.
I could see that still killing a lot of people even though a treatment would guarantee survival
That phrase. I think these people and how they are using tech and memes are part of the current problem of this world. A large part of the problem, in my opinion. It's may be just coping, dark humor for most but it is deep psychosis for others and it's giving them ideas and power over the rest of us. I'd strive to be better than falling into such meme sharing sociopathy.
I'll keep the rest of my words to myself.
“Youhuang Xiang (“Xiang”), 32, formerly a post-doctoral researcher at Indiana University and a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, has been sentenced to more than four months in prison, a $500 fine, and one year of supervised release, after pleading guilty to smuggling biologic materials into the United States from China.”
Let me start by saying that I am not a lawyer but that being said, I don't know how I feel about this. I don't like the taste of plea bargain in my mouth. It feels a lot like the government basically tells any suspect, plead guilty or you will face the maximum fury and unlimited budget of the government. Especially after Aaron Swartz, the fiction that prosecutors and even judges are fair and balanced arbiters of justice has evaporated away.
> They may not be ignored at the whim and folly of scientific researchers and academic institutions.
I for one support scientists and researchers and trust them to follow all the necessary protocol than any pencil pusher. I don't even consider prosecutors living organisms more like a machine whose only goal is career advancement, justice be damned. Expecting grace from them is folly.
I read about this on r/PrepperIntel 2 days ago.
https://old.reddit.com/r/PrepperIntel/comments/1wwektn/irkut...
It isn't a concern. Just more noise to "flood the zone" while the Trump admins keeps doing illegal and scandalous things.
Because that's what happened when people suggested the most obvious origin of the Covid pandemic.