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Hopefully it's contained, because if we get another pandemic conservatives are going to do everything in their power to make it kill as many people as possible.
You get what you voted for. The good old times!
They'll mostly be successful in killing their own voter base, which would ultimately turn out positively?
I think that it'd be pretty hard to describe a plague pandemic in any terms approaching "positively".
For all folks concerned of massive epidemic:
Also, to those concerned that this is a biological weapon lab:
Wikipedia is already referencing articles saying it's a pathogen related to the Black Death.
And for people worried about it, the World Health Organization (WHO) says that "today it can be easily treated with antibiotics and the use of standard preventative measures."
Assuming of course, to be pessimistic, it hasn't been weaponized. Siberian Anti-Plague Research facility doesn't fill me with confidence, and you'd expect the hospital to have tried antibiotics, granted they may have been too late or used the wrong ones.
My 'favourite' fact about Soviet-era bioweapons is that they had a facility on an island in the Aral Sea. Said sea vanished from existence after the Kremlin redirected all the rivers which fed it in an effort to grow cotton in the desert, causing it to shrink to some 10% or less of its original volume. As well as destroying the livelihoods of the fishermen of Aralsk in Kazakhstan, it also made the island full of fucking anthrax among other things part of the mainland.
I'll say this for the Soviets, they didn't do environmental disasters by halves. Also as a Briton we had our own anthrax island in Scotland from the war that was only decontaminated in the '90s.
So if it’s easily treated, and I’m sure they knew this at the lab, why did the worker die?
Many possible explanations.
Let's not discount the possibility of creaking Soviet-era equipment that should have been replaced decades ago but the money was non-existent/spent corruptly/not enough to touch the sides of the neglect/delete as appropriate.
We're talking about the country which operates the poor Kuznetsov which has been begging for death for many years.
In a country where people suicide by 12 knife stabs in the back and where people randomly fall from an inoperable 5th floor window...
I would just say: because Russia?
Aw shit, here we go again…
Plague is caused by a bacterium not a virus!
That's a relief! It's a good thing that antibiotic resistance isn't a problem.
Anti-Plague Research Institute
I bet I know what this mystery virus is
They really are going all out for the midterms. A new pandemic
oh hey look somebody wrote a book about this exact scenario recently...
Wow. What’s Putin doing, manufacturing plague to deal with Ukraine?
Always has been.
The USSR from the Stalin era onwards had world-leading biological and chemical weapons programmes, largely due to having plenty of test subjects in the gulag system.
There are very legitimate reasons to be doing research like this. Every developed nation pretty much has labs like this.
However, that isn't to say none of these are attempting to make weapons. The issue is research for a weapon like this looks pretty much identical to the good kind of research. The only way to know the difference would be getting your hands on documents saying it's for a weapon.
How could Joe Biden and the Democrats let this happen! They're only doing this yo make Trump look bad, and after the election it will conveniently disappear.
Does the author not know that there's a difference between a virus and a bacterium?
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/78544
"Accuse your enemies of that which you plan to do."
One of my personal "Rules of Life" is that people are most suspicious of behavior they are most likely to perform. Thieves always think people are stealing from them, cheaters always think someone is cheating on them, etc. They have to believe that, so they can keep performing the behavior, but blame it on others - you do it (even if they don't), so it's okay if I do it.
Trump lives by this code, he's always accusing people of stealing, cheating, etc., and then does it himself "in retaliation," when what he's really doing is just helping himself to whatever he wants.
“Anti Plague Research Institute”.
That’s a funny way of translating “Illegal Biological Warfare Institute”.
So if Putin calls it the Anti-Plague Research Institute we can be pretty sure they're actively creating plagues right?
Anyone who wants something extra to feel anxious about should read the hot zone by Richard Preston. It's about Ebola, not plague, but it's. . . alarming. Ebola is a virus, not a bacteria like plague, but the difficulty of containment even in secure labs, and the possibilities of mutation - as far as I know, they're not dissimilar. Especially if a government lab has been fucking around trying to weaponise it, as I suspect happened here.
I will never understand the thought behind weaponizing diseases. They kill indiscriminately, even you, the developer or the president who orders it's release. Anybody who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves.
There are cases of Human plague, caused by Yersinia pestis, in the United States now.
Actually, there always have been since introduction, especially in the american southwest. It was never eradicated here.
Awesome. My question is: does Anti-Plague Research Institute actually mean Biological Weapon Research Institute?
