First they claim to have eradicated something.
Then they pat themselves on the back and get complacent.
Then it pops up again years later, “New and improved!” (nastier and drug resistant, for those of you who may have missed the sarcasm).

Have we learned nothing? WE CAN’T “ERADICATE” ANYTHING!
And I am not referring to the fact that matter cannot be destroyed, I am referring to the fact that whatever it is that they claim to have destroyed always manages to live on somewhere, in some form or another.

Every time I hear this claim, I always want to reach out, grab them by the scruff of the neck and give them a shake!

I am going to get down from my soapbox now.
Thank you.

Is that a presidence we want to set?

The one in america, too. I can not see Russia sinking as low as to using something like that.

We should have some for vaccines, but the less, the better.

@13. Scolopendra – Salk came up with the polio vaccine not smallpox

I’m not sure YOU fully understand how pox vaccines work, but there are two types: the Salk, which is a KILLED vaccine, and the Sabin (which is an ATTENUATED vaccine – its infectious part has been deactivated). Neither is a live vaccine, and I doubt you can make a weapon from the killed vaccine any easier than you could from scratch with knowledge of its genome. I might be wrong though.

But again, as Rob in comment 8 says, what’s wrong with using new virus stock to produce vaccines? I don’t think it’d take all that long should a new outbreak occur.

We need to keep it just in case :))

It’s better to have a thing and not need it than the other way around, and the concerns about 100% security being impossible can be calmed by basic logic. Assume the stocks are destroyed and then some new pox comes about (improbable, but uncertainly so, given how diseases mutate). Sure, that makes a new strain that can be studied, but it needs to be isolated, sequenced, analyzed, and treatments/vaccines synthesized. Lots of time for the pox to kill people. Because all poxes are more similar than influenzas are, it’s quite probable the smallpox treatments and vaccines are sufficient to combat it, even if it’s only a stopgap measure until the new treatments are researched… but we wouldn’t have that option anymore.

Now assume that security breaks and someone tries to spread stolen smallpox as a weapon (improbable, and likelihood controlled by security procedures). Since the stocks are still there and we already know how to combat smallpox, the time needed to synthesize treatments and vaccines are minimal. Deaths are thus limited compared to the first scenario.

Risk management is best done through statistics and failure management, not emotion. In these two unfortunate but clearly distinguishable scenarios, destroying the stocks leads to far more anguish than keeping them. Therefore, they should be kept.

Um, if I’m not mistaken, wouldn’t this actually *encourage* someone who had the means to produce the virus (if said entity exists) to go ahead an do so, since not having it around would slow our response time and ability to produce the vaccine? This statement seems particularly silly because it doesn’t bear out at all logically. If you’re the only one to have access to something, that typically puts you at an advantage (which is why the US and Russia want to keep it in the first place, just with different motives).

Oh my, what famous last words. They rank right up there with:

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
— Popular Mechanics

“Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.”
— Marechal Ferdinand Foch,

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
— Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents

“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
— Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
— Lord Kelvin

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”
— Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”
— Western Union internal memo, 1876.

I’d say keep it. Unless you can predict the future with 100% accuracy, it seems like a prudent move to keep it. As unlikely as it may be, it may turn out to be useful for something someday.

Although Rob @#8 has an excellent (and I think the definitive) point on the matter.

- It is a symbolic act – a very positive one. The first disease eradicated, the first natural disaster of kind avoided, no?

- If there is an outbreak, the vaccine can be recreated further on.

So we can weigh the moral of risking an outbreak from the known, kept reservoirs and having deaths before early vaccination kicks in against the moral of risking an outbreak from unknown reservoirs and having deaths before (very) late vaccination kicks in.

The former is much more likely to happen and would be a moral problem to boot. The later would not be such a moral problem.