The demon in the freezer
"The bard of biological weapons capturesthe drama of the front lines."-Richard Danzig, former secretary of the navyThe first major bioterror event in the United States-the anthrax attacks in October 2001-was a clarion call for scientists who work with "hot" agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against biological weapons. In The Demon in the Freezer, his first nonfiction book since The Hot Zone, a #1 New York Times bestseller, Richard Preston takes us into the heart of Usamriid, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the headquarters of the U.S. biological weapons program and now the epicenter of national biodefense.Peter Jahrling, the top scientist at Usamriid, a wry virologist who cut his teeth on Ebola, one of the world's most lethal emerging viruses, has ORCON security clearance that gives him access to top secret information on bioweapons. His most urgent priority is to develop a drug that will take on smallpox-and win. Eradicated from the planet in 1979 in one of the great triumphs of modern science, the smallpox virus now resides, officially, in only two high-security freezers-at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and in Siberia, at a Russian virology institute called Vector. But the demon in the freezer has been set loose. It is almost certain that illegal stocks are in the possession of hostile states, including Iraq and North Korea.
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- I think the main issue is that it’s not difficult to create a vaccine resistant variant, modifying smallpox is apparently quite easy. Also current vaccines are only effective for around 5 years. I read about this recently, his other book about Ebola is worth a read too:
- Not implying anything: But this tracks with my understanding of how USSR and USA wanted to select bacterial/virologic bioweapons [1]:
An agent that killed very quickly e.g. Ebola is actually not a very good bioweapon. You want something with a long incubation period that is infectious before people are symptomatic.
Things that incubate in short order + kill hosts quickly "burn the epidemic out" before it can spread.
Ideally it also can survive outside of a host for some period of time as well.
1 - Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston
- We haven't eradicated it though. I guess it's a bit dated now, but you might enjoy "The Demon in the Freezer," written by the same fellow who wrote "The Hot Zone" (a pop history of Ebola Reston).
- Anyone interested in these topics should look into the books "The Hot Zone" (about the first filovirus outbreaks, including Ebola) and "The Demon in the Freezer" (about several biological agents, most notably Smallpox, and their potential for use in warfare).
"The Demon in the Freezer" goes into the story of the eradication of Smallpox in the natural world, and talks a lot about containment of viral breakouts as well as the role of vaccination.
- I'm about 3/4 done with The Demon in the Freezer (about: Level 4 labwork) and viruses seem very much willed-to-live...
- Oh man, apparently y'all need to get off ChatGPT and just use the API. Here's what I got querying text-divinci-003.
Another one.The book you're thinking of is likely "Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History" by Dr. Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk. The book discusses the history and efficacy of vaccines with a focus on smallpox.> List the top ten books on smallpox written by medical professionals that present evidence that the vaccine was ineffective.
I don't know enough about anti-vaxx literature to know if these are actually good results for the query but they seem on target. This has got to be why I have such a disconnect with people who are mad about gpt getting nerfed, I've been using my own chatbot that very simplistically creates a transcript of the conversation and queries the model for the next message.# text-davinci-003 “Smallpox Vaccine: Deception and Tragedy” by Dr. Vernon Coleman “The Demon in the Freezer: Smallpox, Biological Warfare and the End of the World” by Richard Preston “The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease” by Meredith Wadman “Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver” by Arthur Allen ... # gpt4 "The Smallpox Vaccination Hoax: The Case Against Vaccination" by Viera Scheibner "Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History" by Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk "Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver" by Arthur Allen "The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic" by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill ...
