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.
Are you kidding? A way to smear Obama and portray him as disrespectful to non-whites? The only reason it’s not on Fox is that it reminds Americans that we’ve only had one victory in the War on Terror and the Republican Party contributed nothing positive.
Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power? Sure, their politics influence the nation's foreign policies. But domestic partisan politics is largely irrelevant to the international partners. To the foreign nationals affected by it, you're just USA either way.
I mentioned just the other day, the problem with anti-intellectualism in the US and how it's fed by these sorts of egregious meddling by the administration. There are much less educated and affluent countries that are nowhere near as anti-science as the US. Yet unfortunately, the US exports it abroad too. I explicitly referred the same Pakistani case as an example of that. I'm all for Osama's elimination, but they jeopardized the entire humanity's future by misusing the vaccination program for it.
Despite a century of this nonsense (remember the radium girls?), neither political party cares enough to not pervert science in the interests of humanity. Smallpox and Polio were horrible diseases that caused untold miseries. Even the remote tribes of Pakistan knew their dangers well enough to participate in their elimination, until the US pulled off this dirty stunt. This is a deeply ingrained toxic culture that was reinforced by both parties over the decade. This should be a war crime irrespective of party allegiances.
> Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power?
How can you open a war crime case against a guy who already got a Peace Nobel Prize? And what war crime? Was there a war? Maybe some special military operation against Bin Laden.
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.
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.
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?
Yes, I'm sure that starting the EV revolution, creating a satellite based internet network that covers the all planet and making space launches fully reusable and 10x cheaper is "standing in the way of human progress and history".
These people have been a problem in the west for over a century. They are unintelligent people who spend their lives fighting what confuses them, and replacing it with something worse, that they can understand.
Elon Musk is promoting progress only when he has something to gain from it (in economical terms or in terms of his image), but has no qualms wrecking progress, butchering indiscriminately and hurting prople when it comes to his personal grievances. This is further aggravated by his mercurial and egomaniacal personality, and the false reality build on conspiracies he surrounds himself in.
Hapazardly and chaotically dismantling the US public sector on some ideological crusade was not advancing human progress. Netiher was turning Twitter into some farcical shell of its former self, owned by Saudi Arabia. Neither was sabotaging projects such as high-speed rail systems purely out of spite.
> Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system. … At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.
Any good he has produced along the way (that mitigates the damage he is causing) is only a means to an end for him, and he would have no hesitations burning it all to the ground the moment it suites him. If everyone acted like him humanity would be doomed, not quickly progressing toward some technological utopia.
Or, as his acquaintance Sam Altman put it: "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it."
It's not what his businesses are doing, it is what he says and what he spreads to a tech bro disciple that spreads this shit far away, working with technologies like AI at the forefront, ending up setting us back in our progress & history.
Same applies to Thiel, Zuckerberg and whoever not. Read up on Thiel & Trump, then come back.
OMG Michael, you are so smart. Teach us all reading comprehension, I beg of you.
And tell us more about all the wondrous things you did. Yes, you genius that are not a “babbling idiot” like that Musk, or like those Thiel or Zuckerberg. I mean, those guys are sooooo dumb when compared to your humongous brainpower. Please tell us, when are you sharing with us your matter replicator and your wormhole travel technology?
I worship your intellect Michael. I wish so much I was smart and knowledgeable like you. I love you Michael.
Well, unfortunately I still don’t have access to the hyper sophisticated god like AI that you, in your immense intellect, created, Michael. So I had to use a lesser one.
Of I did though, I’m sure my answer to your - extremely snarky and intelligent - remark world be a text that would stand in the shoulders of giants, together with Ulysses, The Divine Comedy and The Aeneid.
Oh, no Michael, I’m sure, that in your infinite acumen, you know this and just want to spare us, lesser mortals, from the despairing truth. But I know the truth Michael, I know.
They are not just pedophiles, they are the pedophile lizard people Michael. Oh, the horror! The horror!
I must have forgotten that Elon actually is the original founder of Tesla and not a phony. At best he's their money guy.
Do you think Elon knows a single thing about rockets? Do you actually think he has literally anything to do with them? He isn't even capable of forming a sentence without stuttering, much less actually doing literally anything at all. Keep defending your pedophiles, bro. I'm sure in 10 years you'll be glad we have a written record of your stance.
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.
Nobody in Hn type circles wants to remember it because looking back with hindsight it was clearly just part of the theater to get people wringing their hands about whatever chemical or biological WMDs they alleged Saddam had and they killed the program as so as they got their invasion.
Wikipedia somehow makes it eve worse than that:
"The campaign ended early in June 2003, with only 38,257 civilian health care workers vaccinated, after several hospitals refused to participate due to the risk of the live virus infecting vulnerable patients and skepticism about the risks of an attack, and after over 50 heart complications were reported by the CDC."
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.
It might be possible to reintroduce Smallpox and I guess that idiots who also think coal is a good idea might actually be stupid enough to make it happen. But, fortunately humans did wipe out one other disease and unlike Smallpox it wasn't deemed useful as a biological weapon so AFAIK nobody kept copies, it's just gone.
In theory, it's very much doable. We brought back an extinct cowpox virus a while ago using mail-order DNA. Did you know that Smallpox's nucleotide sequence is freely available online?
As for getting the nucleotides themselves, there are numerous services for ordering oligonucleotides which you can "stitch together." I think this used to be done with phosphoramidite synthesis, but the article I linked says they used plasmid synthesis, and ordered from ThermoFisher.
I'm not sure what the price would be on this (I would imagine very high?), but it has to be cheaper than phosphoramidite chemistry. Nevertheless, the price of doing this sort of things w/ plasmids is plummeting.
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.
It sounds as if his legacy is to be unique, a feat never to be accomplished again.
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.
I mentioned just the other day, the problem with anti-intellectualism in the US and how it's fed by these sorts of egregious meddling by the administration. There are much less educated and affluent countries that are nowhere near as anti-science as the US. Yet unfortunately, the US exports it abroad too. I explicitly referred the same Pakistani case as an example of that. I'm all for Osama's elimination, but they jeopardized the entire humanity's future by misusing the vaccination program for it.
Despite a century of this nonsense (remember the radium girls?), neither political party cares enough to not pervert science in the interests of humanity. Smallpox and Polio were horrible diseases that caused untold miseries. Even the remote tribes of Pakistan knew their dangers well enough to participate in their elimination, until the US pulled off this dirty stunt. This is a deeply ingrained toxic culture that was reinforced by both parties over the decade. This should be a war crime irrespective of party allegiances.
How can you open a war crime case against a guy who already got a Peace Nobel Prize? And what war crime? Was there a war? Maybe some special military operation against Bin Laden.
Sounds like RFK Jr…
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.
The current media status quo, and its consequences does, which is why we get to enjoy it.
if you are still alive.
Thinning this is a US problem completely misunderstands the nature of the misinformation problem.
And I hope there's vaccination requirements for travel, according to how public health officials determine threats.
Phil Spector produced music which meant a lot to a lot of people. Still a murderer.
Harold Shipman Saved the lives of thousands, yet should always be labelled a mass murderer because he knowingly positioned hundreds.
Probably not though, I don't think a typical GP saves thousands of lives
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".
(A link for anyone not familiar with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nodule)
[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/guinea-worm-disease-nearly-erad...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_dracunculiasis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb
So it is about the big picture. (And about small pictures like that of Elon making a salut like the other group).
So yes, currently his rockets do not transport explosives. But that can change anytime and I expect it will very soon.
What use is a reusable rocket with respect to explosives?
If you people could only hear yourselves talk...
Hapazardly and chaotically dismantling the US public sector on some ideological crusade was not advancing human progress. Netiher was turning Twitter into some farcical shell of its former self, owned by Saudi Arabia. Neither was sabotaging projects such as high-speed rail systems purely out of spite.
> Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system. … At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.
Any good he has produced along the way (that mitigates the damage he is causing) is only a means to an end for him, and he would have no hesitations burning it all to the ground the moment it suites him. If everyone acted like him humanity would be doomed, not quickly progressing toward some technological utopia.
Or, as his acquaintance Sam Altman put it: "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it."
Same applies to Thiel, Zuckerberg and whoever not. Read up on Thiel & Trump, then come back.
And tell us more about all the wondrous things you did. Yes, you genius that are not a “babbling idiot” like that Musk, or like those Thiel or Zuckerberg. I mean, those guys are sooooo dumb when compared to your humongous brainpower. Please tell us, when are you sharing with us your matter replicator and your wormhole travel technology?
I worship your intellect Michael. I wish so much I was smart and knowledgeable like you. I love you Michael.
Of I did though, I’m sure my answer to your - extremely snarky and intelligent - remark world be a text that would stand in the shoulders of giants, together with Ulysses, The Divine Comedy and The Aeneid.
They are not just pedophiles, they are the pedophile lizard people Michael. Oh, the horror! The horror!
Do you think Elon knows a single thing about rockets? Do you actually think he has literally anything to do with them? He isn't even capable of forming a sentence without stuttering, much less actually doing literally anything at all. Keep defending your pedophiles, bro. I'm sure in 10 years you'll be glad we have a written record of your stance.
https://www.amazon.com/Dissolving-Illusions-Disease-Vaccines...
Whose peace are we now living under and what atrocities did they commit to establish it?
> 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.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_United_States_smallpox_va...
Wikipedia somehow makes it eve worse than that:
"The campaign ended early in June 2003, with only 38,257 civilian health care workers vaccinated, after several hospitals refused to participate due to the risk of the live virus infecting vulnerable patients and skepticism about the risks of an attack, and after over 50 heart complications were reported by the CDC."
(https://screenrant.com/the-dark-knight-best-two-face-harvey-... for those unfamiliar with the quote)
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.
So yeah. Destroy the samples already.
The bad actors are predictable. And I suspect at least two others are lying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderpest
Unfortunately this is not the case: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63707-z
"Measles virus evolved from the then-widespread rinderpest virus most probably between the 11th and 12th centuries."
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
In theory, it's very much doable. We brought back an extinct cowpox virus a while ago using mail-order DNA. Did you know that Smallpox's nucleotide sequence is freely available online?
There's a gulf between assembling a vaccine - which is a commonplace technology, and assembling a viable infectious viral particle.
Being able to order all the oligos of a viral sequence isn't even step 1.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001611.1
As for getting the nucleotides themselves, there are numerous services for ordering oligonucleotides which you can "stitch together." I think this used to be done with phosphoramidite synthesis, but the article I linked says they used plasmid synthesis, and ordered from ThermoFisher.
https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/cloning...
I'm not sure what the price would be on this (I would imagine very high?), but it has to be cheaper than phosphoramidite chemistry. Nevertheless, the price of doing this sort of things w/ plasmids is plummeting.