Comment by password54321
5 hours ago
People just dramatically updated their priors since Covid. We went from pandemics are a problem of previous centuries to any new outbreak might be a pandemic.
5 hours ago
People just dramatically updated their priors since Covid. We went from pandemics are a problem of previous centuries to any new outbreak might be a pandemic.
The world is far more connected logistically before. Yes, we have modern medicine, but many people reject it. So, the priors-updating was probably both overdue, but maybe also overblown.
> Yes, we have modern medicine, but many people reject it
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.
To be fair, in Europe, we largely rejected the russian COVID vaccine. In theory we had good reasons, the vaccine was a bit shady, but I always wondered how much geopolitics played the role and how much it was really the problem with russian manufacturing standards.
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In Pakistan, antivax opposition is in no small part to blame on the CIA abusing "vaccinations" to uncover bin Laden's hideout [1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/09/06/1034631928/the-cias-hunt-for-...
18 replies →
> In Africa
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
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Tbf Covid was unique in that it was a virus capable of airborne transmission while being asymptomatic and also it can be fatal without killing too quickly. That's extremely unusual. Even more rare, some people never showed symptoms or the symptoms were so mild so it was unclear if it was Covid at all.
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.
> ”Pretty much every modern influenza variant is a derivative of the Spanish flu”
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.
I'd further note that the H1N1 flu is widely believed to have gone extinct in the wild, then been reintroduced in 1977 from a laboratory source, probably through a failed vaccine trial:
> 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...
Unfortunately, you can force evolution in bacteria, fungi and viruses. There's more than enough examples of multi-resistant pathogens in all three families, especially in hospitals but also around agriculture (because they use stuff meant as a last-resort to promote animal growth or prevent animals from falling ill to the effects of overcrowding)... honestly between these and prions, I often do wonder how long we as humanity will be able to keep both hospitals and large-scale farming in existence.
Every evolved trait has a cost. We as a civilization have certainly been careless with, say, antibiotic resistance. If we stopped using a certain antibiotic tomorrow and didn't start using it for another 50 years, we'd find that most if not all of the resistant bacteria would've lost that resistance as they'd evolved new traits.
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.
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The disease is not the problem, people's reaction to it, is.
No pretty sure its the disease that kills people.
Some people react to the disease by dying.
The disease is carried by people.
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)
I think you can safely agree that they are not mutually exclusive and both of them are problems. In this particular case, it was a 100% fatality disease in a gain-of-function lab. It is being handled extremely seriously by Russia.
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.
You realize life is complex enough that two things can be true, right? That everything isn't either/or?
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.
The bullet is not the problem, the squishy matter people are made of is.