mk has been pretty insistent on tinfoiling this one. My argument was that any decent bioweapons lab worth their salt wouldn't bother fucking around with something as dumb as SARS because its lethality isn't worth bothing with. His argument, which has slowly worn me down, is that there's ample evidence that the chinese have been fucking around with SARS on the reg because Chinese researchers are just sorta fundamentally reckless. The argument put forth by Richard Preston in The Hot Zone is that Ebola lived into a cave until people started wandering further and further into the jungle. Jumping from animals, then, is just what viruses do. The argument put forth by Ken Alibek in Biohazard is that a few hundred people died in Sverdlovsk because a technician put up a post-it note saying "filters dirty, took out to clean, don't turn on exhaust fan" and the glue on the back of it wasn't sticky enough to keep it from falling to the floor. Jesse Gelsinger died because the gene therapy he was testing used an adenovirus that he already had immunity to. I know a guy who wrote his Ph.D on a solution to this: use filovirus instead of adenovirus. To no one's surprise USAMRIID hired him outta college. He's told me stories of walking around Vozrozhdenia Island and scraping weapons-grade anthrax out of the dirt because when they were testing, there was an ocean between the beach and the biotoxins. Really, I want to believe this wasn't anyone's fault. There have been so.many.examples of this shit going totally fucking wrong and virtually none of it going right. But that desire is growing increasingly difficult to satisfy.
To be clear, there's ample evidence that the international scientific community have been mutating these viruses, and playing with the products for the last decade. However, scientists in China have been doing so under conditions that make a leak more likely.His argument, which has slowly worn me down, is that there's ample evidence that the chinese have been fucking around with SARS on the reg because Chinese researchers are just sorta fundamentally reckless.
There's a probability problem here that I think confounds a lot of people. That is that given enough time, an unlikely event becomes inevitable. So the question is obviously what's the likelihood of something going wrong in a given year? For even a well-run BSL-4 lab, that's a hotly debated question, and estimates vary by orders of magnitude. If, say, the probability of a leak occurring is 1/1000, then the chance of a leak occurring in 10 years (assuming equal weights, when in reality the chance probably goes up as equipment ages), is simply 1 - (1 - 1/1000)^10 = 0.01. One percent isn't great, but maybe it's tolerable depending how bad the agent is. But if the odds are 1/100, then the chance of a leak in 10 years is 9.6%, which is really bad. Now let's suppose the lab isn't being operated at maximum safety, and the odds shift from 99.9% safe to 95% safe. In that case, in 10 years there's a 40% chance of a leak. Basically, we're fucked type of territory. These calculations require 3rd grade math once you know the a priori odds, which are probably unknowable, and therefore should be assumed to be a lot likelier than you think. I don't know that most people think in those terms, but they should. In the linked article, they're contemplating what would happen if hoof and mouth disease got out and the livestock industry was fucked. Here, we're talking about causing Great Depression II. I just can't believe anyone would be that fucking consciousless.
You are now aware that USAMRIID managed to leak a bunch of anthrax into the water table of Frederick, Maryland.The problems date back to May 2018, when storms flooded and ruined a decades-old steam sterilization plant that the institute had been using to treat wastewater from its labs, Ms. Vander Linden said. The damage halted research for months, until the institute developed a new decontamination system using chemicals.
And these are the same dumb fucks who tell you every time they build another BSL-4 lab that the risk of a leak is negligible. There's a BSL-4 lab in downtown fucking Boston that I'm sure the citizens of that city are happy they don't know exists. I'm all for scientific exploration, but we need an ethical guide or else what't the point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruinard_Island Wanna get rid of anthrax? You literally need to blowtorch the top six inches of topsoil and then soak it with 280 metric tons of formaldehyde.Artificial contamination of Gruinard Island off the northwest coast of Scotland occurred in 1942–1943 as a result of tests of a biological warfare bomb containing live anthrax spores. Even by 1979 spores could still be detected in a 3-hectare area of the island. In the 1980s the area was decontaminated by burning the vegetation and spraying with 5% formaldehyde in seawater. By 1987, the ground was declared anthrax-free and, after reseeding, sheep were able to graze safely.