26 AUG 2024 by ideonexus
Marketplace of Ideas in COVID Responses
One way of gauging the current diversity of cultures is to consider the range of responses countries made to the COVID-19 pandemic.120 There was, of course, some diversity, from the ultrastrict lockdowns in China to the more moderate response in Sweden. But the range of responses was far more limited than it could have been. For example, both the Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were designed by mid-January 2020 over the course of a few days.121 Not a single country allowed human chal...Folksonomies: marketplace of ideas
Folksonomies: marketplace of ideas
25 DEC 2012 by ideonexus
Should Smallpox be Made Extinct?
A few decades from now, we may make a brutal,calculated decision to totally eradicate a particular form of life. We already are 99 percent of the way along that path. Even conservationists, who publicly deplore the extinction of innumerable species of animals and plants through neglect, ignorance, or financial greed, have applauded this conscious, murderous act to be carried out by a UN agency. I speak of smallpox virus. Since 1967, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been systematica...1978 article on the state of the smallpox virus, driven to extinction by the United Nations, asks whether it should be preserved in deep freeze for science?
09 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Benjamin Franklin on Vaccinations
In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.Franklin regrets not getting his son the small-pox vaccination, which resulted in his death.
18 APR 2011 by ideonexus
The Story of Inoculation Being Brought to the West
In 1717 Lady Mary travelled to Turkey with her husband, the British Ambassador at Constantinople. There she first witnessed variolation. She described the procedure in a letter to her friend Sarah Chiswell: The small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give it. There is a set of old women who make it their business perform the operation every autumn... People send to one another to know if any of their f...Lady Mary Wortley Montagu introduces inoculation to small pox to the wester world.