Maybe I'm too cynical, but that's what I got from it. The video way overstates the ease of DIY viral research and understates how tightly regulated it already is.
I agree with what you say. But I finally have an excuse to break out the cool image that is a representation of COVID RNA:
Show
That's it. That's the whole thing. ~30 kilobases. That image, put together as an RNA sequence, made for a world plague. I don't know about anyone else but it scares me how a 200 x 200 pixel image could contain enough information to do that.
What it really calls for is serious investment into healthcare and antiviral research. But that isn't military spending.
That image, put together as an RNA sequence, made for a world plague.
According to Mao, the external influence of COVID19 on the western imperialist world order only created a world plague because of the internal contradictions between the "profit motive at all costs" mentality of the political economy and the fact that workers have to produce the surplus value required for such profit by being in a situation where transmission is inevitable as time tends towards infinity. There was also a contradiction between the essential nature of competition in the world economy and the requirement for cooperation between nations to contain/eliminate the virus.
As such, human life was sacrificed for the profit motive and the western bourgeoisie as a whole let the virus spread amongst the workforce instead of implementing controls which would make work safer but jeopardize profit. Furthermore, they prevented poorer countries from having the formulae for vaccines so that they could be in control of distribution and profit from sales.
Since it is more profitable to catch a man a fish so he can eat for a day (at your price) instead of teaching him to fish so he eats for free.
I for sure don't disagree that a society that prioritised human health could have dealt with the plague far more swiftly and efficiently. But COVID-19 was uniquely plague-ready by being both novel to humans and still highly infectious, so you gotta give the virus some credit.
It was widely known among epidemiologists that a coronavirus based outbreak was just a matter of time. A more serious society could have done way more.
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With just the tools we had: The US had a program to distribute masks that was never activated. Cancelling international flights earlier, and actually quarantining cities, could have limited it to just a handful of cities outside of China. We could have distributed vaccines everywhere instead of enforcing international bans on vaccines developed by US pharma companies.
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With governments that take public health seriously: Coronavirus outbreaks were a known risk; preemptive vaccine research could have been funded more, leading to faster vaccine development turnarounds when a variant started infecting humans.
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With a more serious society overall: We could do planned two month global lockdowns once a decade or so, and eliminate COVID, the flu, the common cold, a vast number of unnamed respiratory illnesses, and more.
Just serious quarantines would have made a difference instead we had lockdowns where people would just go mill around walmart because they're bored
We didn’t do lockdowns in the west. We did half-lockdowns. Go ahead and ask a rancher about “half-locking” the gates of the cow pen closed and how effective that is in containment
Lockdowns should never have been self-policed, optional, based on social shame as a motivator. They should have been government enforced, mandatory and based on force as a motivator with all costs covered by the state and food/medicine/etc provided for free during the lockdown period. All the squealing whining hogs would be quite upset but who cares about them, slam the book down and it will all be over soon and they can get back to their treats like Wuhan managed. They would have ultimately preferred to rip the bandaid off than have 3 years of half-assed lockdowns and culture war.
I genuinely believe a socialist world-republic could have done zero-covid indefinitely. It was effective in China until the let-it-rip policies of most of the capitalist world kept it circulating and mutating. Communism could probably eradicate many diseases just with quarantines.
The US had a program to distribute masks that was never activated.
Yep. The postal service had a plan to give every family masks and trump made them stop
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Is that known? I haven't kept up but it was never my impression.
There were specific material situations which allowed this pwrticular pathogen to spread. Having to do with patterns of people living and moving, all highly influence by economics. Likely such pathogens pop into existence all the time but the stars do not align and they don't come to attention.
Ebola was a novel virus in the 70s and it is highly infectious but it was fairly limited in scope.
HIV on the other hand was new about 100 years ago, with infectiousness close to zero. It is basically a miracle to seroconvert. But look at its impact. Once again, everything to do with material conditions.
Trade routes are central to all 4 of the above viruses iirc.
Neither Ebola nor HIV spread through aerosolized particles, which is far and away the main transmission vector of COVID-19. They both only spread through direct bodily contact, so they were nowhere near as infectious.
Again, I don't deny material conditions play a part, and also that if all humans just stood still it wouldn't have spread. But it should be self-evident that the properties of COVID-19 were a key part of its success in spreading, and that those properties are encoded by such little information is all I was marvelling at.
Unfortunately, you are completely incorrect about ebola. It was a sheer miracle of fate Reston virus did not wipe America off the face of the earth in the 1990s. It is asymptomatic in humans - so far.
It would take minimal effort to either modify another virus in the ebola family to take on the airborne properties of Reston virus, or change the virulence in humans. I would not be surprised at all if that had already been done somewhere.
Huh? How am I "completely incorrect about Ebola"? It seems consensus that it spreads through direct contact. Is that not true?
Ebola then spreads through human-to-human transmission via direct contact
If you're arguing the Reston "ebolavirus" (which is not synonymous with "Ebola" as we know it, just as COVID-19 is a specific member of a large group of 'coronavirus') is more transmissive because it can be airborne, and if it was pathogenic to humans it'd be very dangerous. Then, like, we are saying the same thing.
It is basically a miracle to seroconvert
Could you explain this to a philistine such as myself?
They are trying to say that compared to most infectious agents you really have to try hard to get HIV/AIDS. It is only easily transmissible in a few edge cases like sharing needles, receptive anal intercourse.
Monkey kidneys acquired en masse with no questions asked regarding provenance in order to culture polio vaccinations proved to be a dangerous combination. The truth has been buried.
We must ensure that world wide plagues can only come from one place - Fort Detrick.
of course their solution is to forbid and restrict the technology, rather than create a global standard for healthcare
both of these two options are absurd in their scope and necessary coordination/workload/resources, but only one of them is stupid
The real question is why anyone would make a superplague in their garage when warehouse space is so cheap and readily available in most urban environments
Neolib dogshit. It's the similar excuse to how India shouldn't be allowed to make generic covid vaccines.
This exposes the same disdain and misanthrope as liberals' gun control policies. If you leave the poors unattended they'll go Mad Max mode on everyone! There's basically nothing you can do about it except put everyone in a cattle prod ahead of time! And they're all inherently antisocial, there are no circumstances causing alienation, frankly the benevolent state has already done everything it could.
I don't see biotech companies or US allied states EVER developing a super plague and SURELY not doing it on purpose
Kurzgesagt being clickbait low-effort popsci garbage again? Impossible.
Its surprisingly easy to build bioweapons. All you need is a million quid electron microscope, the same extremely reliable refrigeration and warming tech the labs use at 200k each, and need a licence to buy the other raw materials.
This is manifestly not true. Genetic engineering a bioweapon is not the only way to make it.
You can start with a known agent and use cultures or hosts to select for virulence, and you would be able to get surprisingly far. Just ask Japan.
I never mentioned genetics. I mentioned how cultures are needed to be stored for it to work. If you look even at the ramshackle approach 1970s Japanese terrorists used - that still cost them a coupla million dollars worth to make it happen. Ricin was cheaper for them to work with and ended up having the results they'd wanted.
Not quite the reference I had in mind.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
A few million dollars is nothing in comparison to the effect releasing a weaponized agent would cause. There is a reason why the United States is the only country lawless enough to allow biowarfare research to continue. I maintain that you would not even need that much money if you weren't too picky about the final product. You could Tiger King your way to a meth lab grade bioweapon for 100k.
If Gregor Mendel could do it, nearly anyone with lab experience could do the same with yersinia taken from your friendly neighborhood Prairie dog. Or a state level actor could go to the ivory coast.
"we can trust megacorporations, the deep state, and the US with the technology to build super plagues more than anyone else!"
🤡🤡🤡
Would be cool if people could pirate biologics. Imagine downloading a $1M per unit drug and printing it for a few bucks.
Same as the terrorists will build a nuke on the back of a van shit from 2000, someone tell this mfer 24 was not a documentary.
Okay that makes sense....
Restrict TO biotech companies and/or US-allied states
I have a better idea.
oh no, another plague for the libs to ignore because otherwise line go down :(
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