lots of nonsense about labs and biological warfare out there

 the lab issue going around the internet is nonsense, be it about Wuhan or the Ukraine's labs.

the Russians were claiming they were worried about labs sending anthrax, Bubonic plague, or Weils disease as a form of warfare.

Well, you can get anthrax from the soil all over the world,  since those spores last a long long time. But the spores are big, and to use them as a weapon, you have to grind up spores and keep them from clumping, so it can spread through the air to your lungs. This is hard to do without the proper equipment and training, but it has the advantage that it won't spread person to person and cause an epidemic.

Bubonic plague cases occur in the South West: The Navajo reservation gets a few cases each year, so we IHS docs know about it. It is spread by fleabites and is treatable with antibiotics. The Pulmonary form however is quickly fatal: but only would spread in close contact with a patient who developed pneumonia. Isolation and masks help.

Weils disease is something we see in the Philippines after typhoons and floods, where people are in contact with water that has rat feces. A nasty disease, but again one that can be treated with antibiotics if diagnosed quickly.

These labs were about investigating local diseases that could cause epidemics: you analyze the strain of the germ, if it is new or a well known variant. You then can figure out the treatment or make a vaccine to stop it.

Some of this research is risky: especially the reseach where they deliberately change the pathogen to see how it acts in humans, which is what was being done in the USA, until there were a few accidents in US labs so it was banned. But after Obama stopped the risky research in the USA it was funded in China, even though their labs didn't have a good safety record (heck, in 2004 they even accidentally released SARS from one lab).

The dirty little secret is that to be a weapon, a disease must be able to be contained or limited. That means no person to person spread, because once it spreads person to person it can kill everyone, even your own people aka blowback.A biological military threat could be biowarfare but it could also be because of insects, flooding, bad water, or a deliberate release of a pathogen.

There are diseases that have military implications, where you can see outbreaks as part of war. Trench fever (and typhus, both spread by lice) and influenza killed more soldiers than weapons in World War I, but those who did not die often were unable to return to combat quickly. And the malaria caused illness and deaths in the South Pacific region were a real danger to readiness.

and I won't even get into ordinary diseases like Diarrhea. The UN Peacekeepers from Nepal build their latrines in the wrong area, and the result was a cholera epidemic that killed thousands.

Download and read the book on biological threats in wartime LINK

more here

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 the paranoia spead by the anti vaxers is contaminating the ability to discuss these things, and the misinformation by drug companies and the political hacks in the MSM have not helped things, as they censor the free discussion of problems mean that no one trusts them anymore.

the dirty little secret is that this is not an "all or nothing" problem.

all vaccines have side effects, but often are miniscule next to the danger of getting the actual disease.

and although most vaccines work, the dirty little secret is that they don't work all the time, and with time, your immunity goes down. This is what is happening with the various Covid vaccines, but even routine vaccines such as for measles or whooping cough or tetanus don't last forever, so you might need a booster. and vaccines that work 70 percent of the time are commonly used, and the use of "off lable" medicines is common. The biggest scandal might be the censorship of Ivermectin, (which has now been shown not to be a cure all but does cut the risks by half).

Sigh.

In the meanwhile, a doctor who approved of a law to send infectious patients still suffering from covid back to nursing homes, resulting in an estimated 20 thousand deaths in Pennsylvania, is getting another award, not for this but because of being transsexual means never having to say you are sorry. LINK LINK2 LINK3