[lazide]

If you’re trying to decide how big a risk it is that there are other vials out there, definitely. Especially since we’ve stopped wide spread vaccination as it’s considered eradicated.

If some gov’t lab deep in Siberia has some samples - how big a problem would i be? actually?

[krisoft]

> If some gov’t lab deep in Siberia has some samples

That's not an if. We know that the Vector Institute has smallpox samples and they are headquartered in Siberia.

let's use this source maybe: https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/vector-institute-in-nov...

or maybe this one: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/17/blast-sparks-f...

It's really not a secret, and definitely not an "if"

[tibbydudeza]

It is also pretty secure place and there is a detachment of the Russian Army nearby just in case.

[killjoywashere]

Spritz it on some freshly laundered towels in a 5-star hotel (lots of international travelers) and you have a hot mess fast. Same thing in a Motel 6, you get longer dwell the in the first country before it spreads overseas.

[lazide]

That was the 80’s and 90’s ‘wake up in a cold sweat’ nightmare, when one wasn’t having it about nukes, the Cold War, and MAD anyway.

One can hope that anyone with the resources and intelligence to pull that off, would 1) have something better and more useful to do with their lives, and 2) would have someone they care about somewhere and realize it would almost certainly blow back on them too.

Definitely not guaranteed, but so far seems to be panning out. Let’s hope it stays that way.

[a2tech]

I've always thought the smart move would be a first strike with nukes followed up with aerial application of weaponized smallpox over non-nuked areas. The nukes would slow down and hamstring efforts at containment and let the biological agents get a good foothold.

[dTal]

For months, almost the entire Western world just watched slackjawed while Covid spread outward from China - presumably hoping it would just go away.

I wouldn't worry too much about hamstringing containment efforts.

[jacobr1]

Wasn't that because the virus has hit some kind of local maxima of morbidity and human-fear?

If it was some kind "new ebola," I could imagine a much more aggressive response, with much less political polarization.

[ricardobayes]

Can't blame them (us) too much. It was unprecedented, and all previous dangerous fledgling pandemics in the past 10 years did just stop in time somehow. H1N1, MERS, SARS, Ebola etc.

[jacobr1]

The scarier thought is some kind of gene-targeted virus that avoids the blowback

[K0balt]

I don’t think that people understand how relatively practical this is, and it wouldn’t even have to be a dramatically or overtly “bad” virus to have very useful economic effects. Just a virus that dramatically increases the chance of cancer, or screws with nuerons low key causing early onset dementia after years, or whatever.

The incentives that support this type of research will be (or are) too high to ignore.