And the last time someone tried it on an unvaccinated population the results were horrific. Since the unvaccinated are basically most of us today, I think that’s the world’s worst idea. We’ve already tried the whole infecting people deliberately with smallpox idea. I don’t really think we need to go down that road again.
Only in places too ignorant to be vaccinated. In fact the last case was years ago in India I believe. Why would women especially,give a damn what happens to ISIS or the Taliban? Do they have a clue about how much they are hated simply because they are female?
But you would be smart enough to get vaccinated one assumes.Correct me if I am wrong.
So your plan is to kill innocent people who have no access to the smallpox vaccine?
I don’t see why you hate ISIS or the Taliban so much. You’re a kindred spirit to them. They kill innocent people, and you want to kill lots of innocent people. The Taliban sheltered a terrorist, and you want to commit bio-terrorism. Sounds like you all are peas in a pod.
You obviously have no idea about the history of small pox vaccination. You have no idea how much vaccine is currently stockpiled. You have no idea how long it would take to ramp up vaccine production. You have no idea how difficult it is to administer the vaccine, and how even more difficult it would be to do so in a war zone. You have no idea how many people currently alive have never received the small pox vaccine. You have no idea how contagious small pox is. In short, you are too fucking lazy to even read a few Wikipedia articles. But by God, you are going to advocate for a war crime.
Your behavior in this thread is disgusting and immoral. The only difference between you and ISIS is that you probably don’t have the means to kill all the innocent people you want to.
You really don’t know much about the smallpox vaccine, do you? The vaccine was probably one of the most dangerous administered. Idiot upper class white people today have hissy fits at the thought that their pwecious pwincess will have a fever after a shot or maybe a little fussiness. The smallpox vaccine isn’t like that. The vaccine has serious risks of major side effects. Look, I am very pro-vaccine and even I don’t want that vaccine unless I have no other choice.
This is what Dr. Paul Offit, head of the Infectious Diseases Unit Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia had to say about that sucker:
There is really so much wrong with this idea I have to assume you’re simply being facetious.
For your plan to work we would need start start mass production of a smallpox vaccine, as well as begin culturing a large number of small pox does. You’d then plan, I assume, to vaccinate everyone not associated with ISIS. Then you’d manage to infect some ISIS members and then sit back and watch the carnage. Of course most unvaccinated people, or people the vaccine failed to protect, would die and some ISIS member would survive but some people just have to be sacrificed.
I mean only someone doing satire would suggest rolling back one of the great triumphs of modern medicine just to inflict death on a bunch of thugs.
There are other equally probable possibilities, however this is not the pit so I will speculate no further.
I was born in Saskatchewan mid-sixties, and I didn’t receive a smallpox vaccination (I received every other one that was on offer, though - it wasn’t due to my parents being anti-vaxx). I’m middle-aged; I think you can safely assume from that that half of the people in the Western world also have not been vaccinated for smallpox. I certainly don’t want smallpox showing up again.
I worry a bit more about the “we’ll hold our own people hostage” regimes than Polio. Nothing stops the Pakistani government from admitting that elements in their government were complicit in hiding Osama, and that the CIA was justified in doing what they could to get him. They could confess their involvement, apologize, and then use their dictatorial powers to force their people to get vaccines on the justification that their government was at fault and now that Osama’s dead, normal vaccinations will continue. Of course that will never happen, they’ll continue to cry and scream about being victims. My worry is that other governments will use that or continue to use some paranoid xenophobic excuse as to why they can’t trust the West on something; today’s its vaccines, tomorrow it’ll be food and and clean water, the day after its movies and pop culture. So are we as Americans going to just sit back and say we won’t use an effective tactic because it’ll be demonized by some shitty government?
I’m fine with humanitarian aid, I want us to involve ourselves even in conflicts that have nothing to do with us sometimes, but if a government is going to bully its own people, and we’re afraid that if we do something the bullying will become worse, and through that our own goals won’t be accomplished or severely restricted, then I have to think that maybe we don’t give a shit what that government does to its own people because if they won’t exploit vaccines, it’ll just be something else. In this case, I think maybe Osama was worth it. Tomorrow, some other lackey #4 Al Qaeda commander may not be
You do realize that’s a 0.0015% chance of actually having a bad side effect, and literally one in a million of death?
If ever there was a case of flawed risk assessment, it’s your thinking on this.
Um yeah. I sort of realized that. Yeah thanks for pointing it out.
I said I would take the vaccine if I had no other choice. You did read that part, didn’t you? Smallpox has a roughly one in three death rate so obviously risks from the vaccine are much lower. I was responding to someone idiotically asserting that giving the Taliban smallpox is a good idea. Because then you have to start vaccinating everyone on the planet again and that’s a) going to take a long time and b) kill innocent people.
As Dr. Offit points out about the vaccine, it is still far more dangerous than many vaccines on the market today:
It’s a relatively dangerous vaccine for a very dangerous disease. We are better off not ever opening up that particular can of worms ever again.