Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89 (opens in new tab)

We still have another chance for eradication in humans with Polio.

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.

He has quite a bit of chemical warfare weighing down his record.

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

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?

I thought it was clear from my statement about politicians and empire builders that I was talking about people who did good, useful things.

Genghis Khan also not too bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica

Whose peace are we now living under and what atrocities did they commit to establish it?

Greatest, not most fucked

Yeah how dare he... helps eradicate diseases!

Actually, do we need to keep samples anymore?

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.

So yeah. Destroy the samples already.

Coincidentally, that would be the first time it would be urgent to study.

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...