Sure a purposeful bioterrorism outbreak is a much worse scenario than a lab leak, and you wouldn’t need a suicidal patient zero, you could have a fully vaccinated bioterrorist with an atomizer of “perfume” (just keep it under 3.4 oz). I still think that with modern contact tracing and vaccination it could be gotten under control before it reached Covid levels of infection.
I also agree that it would be a much worse situation in a poor or politically unstable country, but I think the possibility of a smallpox pandemicould cause wealthy countries to lose their shit to the point of flooding the zone with medical resources, and military if necessary.
That liver is in the Mutter Museum, a place that is on my bucket list.
Unlike smallpox, against which I was vaxed as a baby in 1965, although I don’t have the typical arm scar. I do have a small cratered scar on my shin, which might be from that or chicken pox, IDK.
The Mutter Museum is so very worth it. Technically there should be an umlaut over the u but I have no idea how to do that. It’s a fantastic place to visit. Giant intestine. Lifecasts of conjoined twins. Collection of things removed from patients’ stomachs. The soap lady. What is arguably the tallest human skeleton on exhibit in the world.* I recommend the Mutter museum to everybody but the pregnant- the collection of malformed fetuses gives them yet more to worry about.
This skeleton has the longest thighbones, but stands bent over.
Ebola outbreaks have occurred many, many times in equatorial Africa, due to the presence of host animals. It’s such a dramatic disease, it would be unlikely to drastically spread outside those areas.
In the fall of 2014, one of my FB/IRL friends posted that her then 15-year-old daughter came to her in tears, saying, “I’m scared. I’m afraid we’re all going to die from Ebola” and Mom flipped open her laptop and showed her why that would be extremely unlikely here in the American Midwest, and it led to a long conversation about AIDS.
I also do not believe that the people who were flown back here for treatment were the first cases of Ebola seen here; I’m sure there have been others who were never correctly diagnosed. Here’s a video about the biocontainment unit in Omaha, where several people were treated (and one died, but it’s now believed that he would not have recovered no matter where he had been). I’m pretty sure this was made for Nebraska PBS, and in the meantime, they have treated and quarantined COVID cases there, in addition to other tropical diseases.
Here’s a TED Talk from a woman who got Marburg Disease, which is very similar to Ebola, after visiting a bat cave in Uganda. SHE was actually treated in a pediatric ICU, because that’s where that hospital had a bed, and not properly diagnosed until some time later.
I am absolutely convinced the reaction would in fact involve millions saying it was all a hoax, at least in the first stages of the outbreak. And that’s all it would take.
The most unexpected things I’ve found in donated books were a picture of several people at a Halloween party, one of them a man dressed as a female hula dancer, and someone’s mammogram results from 2006, which fortunately were normal.
We know exactly what a world would look like with smallpox on the loose, because that’s what used to be considered “normal”. Yes, it was bad, but we survived it, and eventually beat it.
And that was from a starting point where it was already everywhere. In any modern outbreak scenario, it’d starting from one, or a few in the case of deliberate terrorism, hotspots. We could probably beat it just with aggressive testing, contact tracing, and quarantine, even without vaccination, and those few million doses of vaccine we do have would make it almost certain, if used in a “ring vaccination” strategy like what’s almost eliminated polio.
