https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_prog...
>"When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague," says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, "we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way... to make you want to go out and socialize... this was some horrifying stuff."
> . . .
> Former assistant secretary of defense Andy Weber agrees. "I grew up thinking Reagan’s phrase ‘Evil Empire’ was an exaggeration," he tells us. "Then I learned what the Russians were doing [with biological warfare]." He pauses for effect. "It was evil."
The accounts are from Annie Jacobsen's notes in "Biological War".
(the link is a translation to Russian, I was unable to find the original text in English)
Also consider that toxoplasma changes rat's dopamine serum level to such extent that they stop fearing cats. The same happens with humans, changes in dopamine serum level are so profound that toxoplasma-infected people become more appealing than regular people.
And people take her seriously?
Where was this claimed? Do we have any definitive confirmation of the Roswell incident anyway?
https://web.archive.org/web/20110713153629/https://www.washi...
The engineers were told that the children were rumored to have been kidnapped by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi madman who, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, was known to have performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures mostly on children, dwarfs, and twins. The engineers learned that just before the war ended, Josef Mengele made a deal with Stalin. Stalin offered Mengele an opportunity to continue work in eugenics. . . . in secret, in the Soviet Union.
Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain and provided Stalin with the child-size crew. . . .
What makes one socialize is dopamine [1]: "Hypomania, manifesting with feelings of euphoria, omnipotence, or grandiosity are prone to appear in those moments when medication (dopaminergic medication - thesz) effects are at their maximum."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine_dysregulation_syndrom...
This dopamine dysregulation occurs naturally in people with toxoplasmosis.
This kind of mistake - mistaking dopamine and endorphine, - strongly suggests a fake. I know of one such fake from the former employee of my friend, you can read his account here [2]. My friend was a lead of the "secret" laboratory (next to Kitay Gorod metro station in the center of Moscow, in an institute that needed no documents to enter) that researched how "psychics" and "healers" achieve their results.
[2] https://lit.lib.ru/t/torin_a/text_0100.shtml (it is in Russian, but language is not a barrier at all nowadays)
The laboratory researched what these "extrasensing people" do and found nothing - given very little training an ordinary men can do the same and even better. At the end of USSR, there was a string of visitors from USA there in the lab, and one of those visitors successfully persuaded US government to open similar research program, according to [2].
The fearmongering of "endorphin-producing bugs that make one socialize and spread" looks like, well, fearmongering to obtain funds for Big Pharma's government contracts, etc. It messes up two very different neurotransmitters, a mistake that real scientist would not make.
(but I agree it's probably fake).
Before I clicked that link I had never heard of Breaking Points, a political series with over 2MM subscribers. I'm a YT premium subscriber and watch a ton of political stuff, much of it damn similar to what that channel produces.
I read a bit about bioweapons re covid. Apparently Xi said he wanted China on a par with other countries in all military technology which presumably included biological - the Wuhan lab was run by the military and very secretive - China signed the Biological Weapons Convention not do do that kind of thing.
Also a bit on the Ukraine biolabs stuff - there were conspiracy theories they had those making biological weapons funded by the US which I'd assumed was just nonsense but they were actually real soviet bioweapons labs that the US had funded to switch to non weapons research.
Every single one of the people infected by COVID has been contaminated by someone around them.
(It wasn't true of the plague during the great pandemics, as it was also borne by rats and their poop)
Perhaps the Russian military is overreacting with the blanket quarantines, but the odds are more likely that they understand the nature better than anyone else.
Again, normal pneumonic plague approaches 100% fatality rates. This is potentially a weaponized form.
This is an "oh, fuck" moment.
The reason we've haven't had more outbreaks of more diseases in the last century is because we had a lot of smart vigilant well-resourced people who very much felt the disease was the problem, and took steps to mitigate.
Classic late-stage civilization blunder is taking the fruits of civilization for granted. Sorry you're not aware of those things, but that's on you.
Yea you are definitely right about that. In Africa (specific countries I can’t currently recall) attempts at vaccination programs for example are often met with hostility or suspicion or even some people believing a vaccine causes the disease.
There was also vaccine skepticism during the COVID-19 pandemic in countries like China which refused first-to-market western vaccines out of fear and suspicion. It’s tragic all around.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/09/06/1034631928/the-cias-hunt-for-...
That Bin Laden operation was so insanely short-sighted in the use of a vaccine program for spying. Completely erodes trust where it should never have eroded, and rightfully contributed to antivax mentality, not just in Pakistan, but also in the US. "Trust us, we're doctors" means nothing.
I like a win. But a clean win is worth being proud of. It would actually be really cool not to shoot yourself in the foot, I think.
If they’re not responsible then everyone else gets to claim not being responsible for the actions of their governments too.
The US government has murdered a lot more civilians than Bin Laden ever did, but there's not really anyone arguing for broad collective punishment of its citizens (well, ecept for thr Bin Laden-likes)
Sure but that’s a claim you made up, it’s not one I am asserting. For example the US isn’t punishing the people of Pakistan, it simply enacted a temporary and targeted scheme to kill bin Laden. There may be other effects but any action anyone or any country takes has other effects. The government of Pakistan harbored bin Laden and then an effect of that might have been temporary vaccine skepticism. But those are choices the government of Pakistan and the people of Pakistan make too. They are also responsible.
> The US government has murdered a lot more civilians than Bin Laden ever did, but there's not really anyone arguing for broad collective punishment of its citizens (well, ecept for thr Bin Laden-likes)
By that logic the German government, Chinese government, and Russian government have murdered even more.
The US doesn’t intentionally murder civilians though which is a key difference. Results matter but intentions do too.
Yes, I'm sure the kids who missed their polio vaccinations were all directly responsible for harbouring bin Laden.
Perhaps you will suggest they were playing a long game of hide-and-seek with him?
Your view here is a very western colonial one in which you infantalize other people and cultures and believe you are superior and thus must help them, they have no responsibility for their own actions, and so forth.
If the people of Pakistan (or anywhere) are deprived of their agency as you are here to suggest, then we must colonize them for their own good, set up the institutions, take over their ministry of health, and so forth. That’s how the children get their Polio vaccines. I do not propose this because I do not hold these views, but you cannot escape the effects of the viewpoint in which you espouse here.
In the USA too. Just look at all the nonsense around the MMR vaccine in Trump's orbit and what's happened to the CDC and FDA under RFK's leadership
Focusing on the US is just a western privileged point of view focused on tropes like American exceptionalism.
In Europe’s defense, which is a very broad thing to speak of anyway, they had a vaccine either already there or close enough so why give Putin any credence when you could wait just a little bit longer?
It's very hard to trust something coming out of their system. It's something inherited from the USSR.
Apparently this isn't even being reported in the news in Russia, just in the local news.
Or for example, Trump as president sent COVID tests for Putin, when the pandemic started, in secret. Why?
That is an understantement. The Russians publicly acknowlaged the vaccine aproval had been rushed and international protocols hadn't been met. And that is what they said publicly.
Since more reputable vaccines were comming online from other sources, why take the risk?
https://web.archive.org/web/20200819152533/https://www.teleg...
Hemorrhagic fevers (including Ebola), for example, are incredibly deadly but that really limits their ability to spread. You still have to be diligent but there's a reason why Ebola has been contained to parts of Africa the the virus seemingly spreads from animals to humans every now and again, starting another local outbreak. But it's never spread globally and it's unlikely to.
Probably the last comparable disease to Covid was the Spanish flu in terms of its ability to spread and that was over 100 years ago. It's worth noting that the Spanish flu could also spread asymptomatically, which also explains it's impact to a large degree. Pretty much every modern influenza variant is a derivative of the Spanish flu, which also tells you something about what tends to happen to novel diseases.
Y pestus is a bacteria, not a virus. We now have antibiotics that could likely combat it, which was obviously something that didn't exist in medieval Europe. Back then it wasn't at all clear that diseases spread by microorganisms at all. Plus, rodents were key to that spread and that's a far smaller problem now.
The nightmare scenario is probably some deadly variant of measles because measles is so incredibly contagious, probably more than any other disease I can think of. It can survive airborne for a very long time and in the modern era we've traced outbreaks of tens of thousands of cases to one single person. But the ability of measles to survive outside a host is also (luckily) incredibly rare.
I'm reminded of the pronghorn antelope, a herbivore that evolved fast speed to avoid a predator that no longer exists, a cat having died out 7000+ years ago. It still has that speed but it has a real cost to their metabolism and their need to constantly eat. at some point they're going to lose that if it's not reinforced by some new predator or other evolutionary advantage.
The problem is, for most of the multiresistant species we don't have anything we can use in the 50 years we need to wait for one resistance to be outcompeted. And we haven't discovered any major new class of agents in decades as we cut back foundational research, which makes the situation worse - we don't just have substances, we don't have the pipeline to develop substances.
Sure, for bacteria we got phage therapy, but we lost a lot of the knowledge there during the collapse of the USSR, not all bacteria are suitable for phage usage, phages have their own side effects (including our immune system attacking the phages as well), and we have mRNA based vaccines but these act too late (when the patient has already caught the pathogen) and are useless in immunosuppressed patients such as organ transplant receivers and some cancer patients.
Not really. While it was true for much of the last century that many “seasonal flu” viruses were direct descendents from H1N1 Spanish flu, the H1N1 that caused the 2009 “swine flu” pandemic was a distinct strain combining new genes of pig, avian, and human flu origins. Since then, derivatives of that virus have replaced earlier ones as the most common circulating H1N1 types.
And right now the most common circulating influenza is actually H3N2 from a completely different (avian) lineage with origins in the 1968 pandemic.
> The reemergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens.19,31
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322
This explanation is now printed uncontroversially in major journals, though at the time the WHO rejected it:
> Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bullwho...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonic_plague
> Former head of the national public health agency Rospotrebnadzor stated that the disease the researcher died of is "most likely not the plague, but even if confirmed, there will be no spread of this disease
Very reassuring.
'The “young adult male” died eight hours after he was admitted to the hospital, where doctors initially suspected he had hantavirus disease or bacterial pneumonia. Post-mortem testing confirmed Y pestis presence in his blood and lung tissue. It's Arizona’s first pneumonic plague death since 2007.'
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/plague/cdc-reminds-doctors-southw...
Pneumonic is the most transmissible. There are also no commercially-available vaccines for it in most countries. That's why this is worth paying attention to. Not reacting. But keeping a close eye on. Russia being Russia we'll probably only learn if containment was lost from Mongolia or China.
Where are you getting this from?
Treating that low number like a low number is not "discounting" rural US citizens. The US - all populations included - does not really live with the hantavirus in any real sense. It's incredibly rare. 10x as many people are struck by lightening annually in the US.
It is an incredibly rare disease, so it is hardly something that would qualify as “endemic” to any population in the US. Rural populations in the US do not feel it like rural populations in many other countries. Acknowledging that is not discounting or forgetting rural populations in the US. That is not a fair accusation in the slightest.
For example, Gene Hackman's wife, Betsy Arakawa, famously died from hantavirus. They lived in a wealthy gated community in Santa Fe.
Why pneumonic plague? Pneumonic plague is the form of infection that occurs when plague bacteria are inhaled in aerosolized form into the lungs, or when septicemic plague (plague in the bloodstreams) reaches the lungs. Like, for example, when a test tube breaks. Her method of infection was a pretty textbook vector for pneumonic plague. Other cases have been caused when tissue samples of infected rodents have been splayed open, for example, or when blood from an infected person splatters the respiratory tract. Plague bacteria spreads pretty poorly otherwise, which is why the main vector for bubonic plague is flea bites.
It’s bacteria, antibiotics work more generally than vaccines for viruses do.
There are of course, antibiotic resistant bacteria but we still have some exotic antibiotics in our arsenal.
If anything for a widespread bacterial plague I’d be more concerned about our ability to produce enough antibiotics rather than _if_ we could develop a cure
But isn't the 24 hour critical window of treatment measured from the onset of symptoms?
Muted for the generally offensive attitude.
If you have a point you say it, don’t craft a witty question to reveal an error and then respond with a woosh when people think you are being genuine. At any rate the root of the “mistake” was further up.