I don’t think many people know about or remember the 2003 smallpox vaccination campaign.¹
> The campaign aimed to provide the smallpox vaccine to those who would respond to an attack, establishing Smallpox Response Teams and using DryVax (containing the NYCBOH strain) to mandatorily vaccinate half a million American military personnel, followed by half a million health care worker volunteers by January 2004. The first vaccine was administered to then-President George W. Bush.
Not if the CIA has anything to say about it: CIA fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan[0]
...The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden. It led to the arrest of a participating physician, Shakil Afridi, and was widely ridiculed as undermining public health.[2][3] The program is credited with increasing vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan[4][5][6][7] and a rise in violence against healthcare workers for being perceived as spies.[8] The rise in vaccine hesitancy following the program led to the re-emergence of polio in Pakistan, with Pakistan having by far the largest number of polio cases in the world by 2014.[8]
International law does not apply to the leaders of the western hegemony. It is merely a tool used to oppress poor nations even further.
This fact only further proves one thing: the CIA is a terrorist organization and the state behind it is responsible for some of the most disgusting things this planet has ever seen.
Given the period of 2010-2012, the president at the time was Barack Obama. It does not seem realistic that people would accept opening a criminal case.
CIA at its best, f_cking up world one bit at a time (and amount of those bits amount to quite a few kilobytes at least at this point, I can attest that every European country I've ever lived in carries some more or less visible involvements in past few decades although this one is quite a spectacular clusterf_ck)
Perhaps I'm overly an optimist, but I have a feeling we will develop the informational and psychological technology to combat the destructive misinformation campaigns that brainwash people into harming their children with anti-vaccine beliefs.
We are not there yet, because the destructive media forces are too new and we haven't developed defenses against information diseases like RFK Jr. But we will get there. Two steps forward, one step back.
Russia is close to falling, which is the true source of many of the mental viruses that are destroying democracies. And now, Russia's biggest win, the US, is proving that instead of heading towards fascism, that the people will actually stand up and fight back. Six months ago, the outlook was far more uncertain and if the US had not resisted, or Trump had picked a softer target than Minnesotans (never invade a winter people in winter), I would probably be feeing far different.
Things in the US are going to get far worse from here, and there will be a political war, but at least there will be a political war against the fascism. A lower bound has been established for badness that at least allows saving democracy in the US. I have not been this hopeful since October 2024.
How does a public that derives its knowledge from authority (For example, how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat and orbits the sun? Would they be able to reach those conclusions if school books taught something else?) stand a chance at resisting misinformation spread by trusted authorities?
As a non-American I don't care what you do, if you want to behave like irresponsible idiots without any regard for the lives of others you have that right. Just don't subject vulnerable individuals in other countries to your own bad choices (you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful). Maybe visitors from the United States should have to present vaccine certificates at airports or be quarantined at their own expense.
Canada already lost their measles elimination status and had several times higher measles rate than the US.
At this point, anyone pushing anti-vaccine thinking as an American problem is just pushing anti-American bias. Vaccine misinformation and hesitancy is an almost worldwide problem.
People can simply have different perspectives on things. Measels has mortality rate of around 0.1% while small pox has a mortality rate of around 30%. So the individual risk from measels is relatively low leaving plenty of room for individual choice.
There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox, which led to the discovery that infection with cow pox (which is relatively harmless) provided immunity to small pox - hence 'vacca cine', vacca = cow in latin.
But there's a long history of people trying to self vaccinate with all sorts of things against small pox including using scrapings off somebody's small pox wounds to hopefully give oneself a light infection. Needless to say that came with well understood side effects up to and including full-on small pox infection. But when the death rate is 30%, people were willing to do some crazy things, because the risk:reward was seen as worth it.
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FWIW I did ultimately decide to vaccinate my children against measels, but it was not an easy decision, because it is in general not that risky a disease whose mortality rate had already precipitously declined (from 13 per 100k to 0.19 per 100k) [1] before a vaccine was first introduced in 1963. Obviously I think it's the right decision, but I also wouldn't really fault anybody for going the other direction either.
A friend's favorite Wiki page is on the micromort. [1] I found it kind of banal, but perhaps that's my more casual attitude towards death. I suspect the average person doesn't realize, or doesn't accept, how brief life truly is. One micromort is something with a 1 in a million chance of death. So with measels, we're talking about 1000 micromorts, if you're infected - which is also extremely unlikely. So if you give yourself a 1% chance of ever being infected with measels (which would be quite high) then not vaccinating would be down to a 1% * 1000 = 10 micromorts of risk.
All non-natural cause of death in the US, excluding suicide, is about 1.3 micromorts per day. So it's the same all non-natural cause risk you'll be exposed to over the next week. The page offers a lot of other comparables - traveling 100 miles by biking, 2500 by car, or 10k by airplane, and so on.
My parents both got measels, and they had no hesitancy getting me vaccinated. I’m significantly taller than my dad, who lost 40 pounds when he got German measles when he was 17. I grew several inches that year.
People who don’t get vaccinated are bad people. I have no qualms saying it.
I don't think this is a great argument. The reason is that Rubella/German measels is in the majority of cases very mild, in many - people will not even know they had caught it. If you take a large enough sample you'll absolutely find people winning a lottery that they really don't want to win, but the exact same logic is used to by people to avoid vaccinating. For instance the MMR vaccine can cause all sorts of nasty things in extreme cases, but in the average case it's believed to be mostly harmless. Though of course we're always discovering new things about medicines. There's even new side effects in e.g. tylenol still regularly being discovered and published about.
Your child being vaccinated against measles is 1. yes, protecting them, but 2. also protecting all the other children at school they interact with, and vice-versa. It isn’t just an individual choice. You should definitely fault people for going the other direction because they are willingly increasing the chance of your child or your child’s friends getting measles.
The US sees in the ballpark of a hundred million tourists, business travelers, and migrants per year. And these people are vectors for basically everything and are numerically very large. And you're inevitably going to bump into and interact with these people. So I think the idea of domestic herd immunity is increasingly nonsensical because 'domestic' is no longer even remotely close to a closed system. And global herd immunity is nonsensical simply because it's wholly unrealistic, and at that sort of scale any small issue can explode into a huge one: see - source of most modern cases of polio.
There is no reason to believe that a lack of nitrogen was a problem in particular. It seems that most effort was spent on getting fertilizers with phosphorus and other minerals, nitrogen was secondary, as many plants can obtain it from the air. If anything, it allows our modern, heavily cereal skewed diet. Poor nutrition rarely meant an absolute lack of food, most of the time it only meant insufficuent quality, and the green revolution was a massive step backward in that regard
That is literally true, but for anyone who hasn't studied plant biology, I think that "some plants have evolved specific structures to host obligate symbiotic bacteria that obtain nitrogen from the air and convert it into a form usable by the plant" is close enough to "many plants can obtain [nitrogen] from the air".
Norman Borlaug probably comes close. H. Trendley Dean was also impactful on a large scale, while its seemingly less important it helps a lot of people.
So creating cheap, reusable giant rockets is standing in the way of human progress? Being able to use neural links to restore sight to the blind is standing in the way?
Maybe not, but one can always converse curiously and ask them what they meant. It's nicer to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
The Saturn V was simply a scaled up V2. The critical components were all there:
1. boundary layer cooling
2. pre-heating fuel and cooling the nozzle by pushing the fuel through tubes in the nozzle
3. baffles to prevent pogo-ing
4. turbo fuel pumps
5. supersonic airframe
6. guidance system (although primitive)
The V2 was an ineffective military weapon that did little damage - because its guidance system was too primitive to be able to hit a target. Hitler also poured enormous resources into the V2 program, shifted away from producing weapons that were effective.
I think this is a rationalization. Humans are always tempted to look up to power, and what's more powerful than an empire? It goes unquestioned that we should respect the Roman empire, for instance, and you pretty often see an argument for the Mongolian empire. But these days, we know that violence is bad so we have to find other reasons to justify our feelings. So we talk about the "peace" they established after all the war. But is the cost really worth it? How many people not attacked by bandits do you need to justify an innocent murdered by raiding soldiers? Never mind that even the "peace" is often sustained through oppression. The Romans didn't invent crucifixion for Jesus, it's something they did. Never mind that the empire never lasts, and plants seeds of the next dozen wars as it falls, watered with yet more blood.
Ask yourself: if you honestly intended to create peace, would a century or more (in the case of Rome) of bloody conquest actually be the optimal plan? I would say no. An actual plan for peace through strength looks more like NATO than Rome.
Any good an empire builder does is accidental. Whatever they tell you or even themselves, they do it for glory and power, and their actions are optimized for that over any actual benefits. They were not nobler than the conquerors and colonizers were rightfully decry today.
At least he went down fighting (https://archive.is/M4nek, the op-ed referenced in the article). That's an impressively dignified response to a gobsmacking shift in public opinion. In his position, I might have given up and gone full Two-Face.
I'm starting to think that we should be calling it "contained", not "eradicated". Eradication invites the question "Well then, why do we still need the vaccine?"
It really is eradicated - it's the only human disease we've truly eradicated. There are literally no more cases of smallpox in the wild, period.
The problem is that there are samples of viable virus in the labs of the US and Russia. So - it's eradicated but we have to keep stockpiles of vaccine around anyway. But nobody gets vaccined for it any more; it has an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio when the virus simply does not circulate. Smallpox kills ~30% of people who get infected with it; the first-generation vaccine had a mortality rate of about 1 in 1,000,000.
(There are newer-generation vaccines developed and being developed that have an even better safety profile but we still wouldn't use them because the cost - the literal cost and the side effects and general "meh, why get another shot?"-ness outweighs the benefit of protection against something you don't need protection against.)
mRNA vaccines go from sequenced DNA to vaccine without any need to store or culture the original virus in the lab.
We could destroy our existing stockpile of smallpox and be ready to produce vaccines based on it faster than we could thirty years ago.
We couldn't validate new vaccines without access to the live virus, but then, if we aren't willing to expose hopefully-volunteers to a disease with a 30% mortality rate, we weren't really validating it anyway.
But yeah, I think we could probably unilaterally "disarm" and destroy our smallpox samples, and from a national security standpoint, I don't think we'd be significantly worse off; if the weaponized strain is significantly different from the old strain, enough to bypass vaccination, we'd need samples of the new thing in any case.
I'm not even sure we'd be substantially limiting new research on it, given that smallpox doesn't infect animals, I'm not sure if there's even any animal testing we could do with a live virus.
This is tangential to your point, but smallpox vaccine protects against mpox (the virus formerly known as monkeypox) and the CDC still recommends it for people in certain mpox risk groups.
Except it wasn't eradicated. It's still stored at the US's Fort Detrick, and in Russian and Chinese bioweapons facilities, too be released as a bioweapon, now that no one has natural immunity anymore.
Most people aren't vaccinated for smallpox, and only a very small amount of vaccine is even produced, mostly for medical and military people. Targetting is easy, here's your blanket while the power is out...