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Malaria vaccine delivered by a mosquito bite
- theultdev 2y agoYeah let's not do this. I'd rather we eradicate the mosquitos themselves. What could go wrong with nonconsensual, covert, forced mass injections. Today it's used for malaria, tomorrow? When releasing these mosquitos, will they be getting consent of everyone in the area?
- sebtron 2y agoDo regular mosquitos ask for consent before biting you?
- theultdev 2y agoDo you think it's okay to kill a human because other animals kill humans? Just because nature does something, doesn't mean it's okay to allow humans to do it.
- therein 2y agoThis is not a regular mosquito anymore. Imagine the following: we found the part of the brain that's making you love everything done by the authority. We developed a genetic vaccine against it and we are deploying it via mosquitos. You wouldn't say the same thing.
- vlod 2y ago>I'd rather we eradicate the mosquitos themselves. And you know the extent of this on the whole eco-system?
- theultdev 2y agoDo you know the extent of injecting modified parasites on the human population? And yes, many places have eradicated mosquitos with no shift in the ecosystem. It's pretty much the one creature that all animals would love to have eradicated or at the very least mitigated.
- vlod 2y ago> And yes, many places have eradicated mosquitos with no shift in the ecosystem. I read that the tropical rain forests are unlivable by humans because of mosquitos and that limits the amount of deforestation that occurs. Whether that's really true or worthwhile I'll leave it to others to argue over.
- dheera 2y agoI mean, Indonesia has 280 million people living in a tropical rainforest climate ... that's 80% of the US population, on a a bunch of tropical islands. Deforestation is an issue, as those 280 million people do need to be fed. Mosquitoes don't really get in the way of deforestation. Insect repellents and pesticides do work. And when an area is deforested and either converted to urban or agricultural land, mosquitoes don't really linger in that area anymore.
- shkkmo 2y agoNot really true. Mosquitos are an important part of the ecosystem, they (especially their larva) are important food sources for other creatures. However, most species of mosquitoes do not bite humans and not all of those are capable of spreading disease. What you are probably referencing is experiments in extermining specific disease carrying species. I don't think those studies have claimed "no shift in the ecosystem."
- chmod775 2y agoMosquitos are a food source for some reptiles, fish, birds, and other insects and male mosquitos also serve as pollinators, of which many a species are already in danger.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- theultdev 2y agoWhen people talk about mosquito eradication programs, they're talking about subspecies that suck blood and carry the major diseases like malaria. Not all mosquitos.
- ben_w 2y agoThe "today x tomorrow y" argument doesn't work, as the villains of tomorrow don't care about any success of x. For all x and y.
- cosmojg 2y agoI mean, the paper's been published. The cat's out of the bag. If a sufficiently motivated villain wants to use this technology for villainy, they can now.
- nonelog 2y agoSo no say at all, as to what goes into our own bodies? Really?
- autoexec 2y ago> So no say at all, as to what goes into our own bodies? Really? Right? Everyone has been kindly asking malaria to stay out of our bodies for ages now! Malaria has no respect at all for our rights!
- chung8123 2y agoWe don't put malaria into mosquitos to spread it.
- autoexec 2y agoIf we did we could just stop doing that, but sadly, we don't have that option.
- snowwrestler 2y agoIt’s like the trolley problem but one side of the track is clear. But the concept is now so deeply engrained that some people still object to the idea of pulling the lever.
- from-nibly 2y agoThe trolley problem is not for assesing ends vs means discussions, or greater good discussions. It's for asessing how people interpret responsibility.
- ben_w 2y agoIt's not quite that. If this was a trolly problem, one side would have several million deaths, there's a lot of switches we can activate at any time, and we're not entirely sure how many people are on each of the other tracks just that there's not many before the bend in the line that takes it through a thick dark jungle of our ignorance.
- autoexec 2y agoMan, the conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this news, but I think this is great! While I'd still prefer we just eradicate the disease carrying mosquito population entirely, this keeps our enemy in the ecosystem where they can be some other critter's breakfast while still helping to mitigate one of the worst harms they cause us.
- theultdev 2y agoHow is it great? It's the equivalent of someone coming up to you with a needle full of something and stabbing you with it (that they already stabbed other people with) without your consent. I just don't see how injecting people with genetically modified parasites without their consent is "great".
- nancybelowzero 2y agoThe same thing ordinary mosquitoes do already?
- theultdev 2y agoYeah and some animals kill humans, does that mean it's okay to kill humans too? Right now you can consent to get a malaria vaccine, no covert parasite needed. If the counter that it is for poorer populations, I'd still say you may want to ask them if they want to be injected with a genetically modified parasite. If one single person doesn't want to be in the area, you shouldn't do it. Would you support them dropping these in your neighborhood?
- l3x4ur1n 2y agoIt seems to me the people here don't live in malaria infested countries. I think the victims would be gladly bitten by a vaccine than a deadly virus.
- ChrisClark 2y agoThe vaccine misinformation has created entire groups of people irrationally terrified of them. :( And those people are only going to cause more death and suffering because of their ignorance. :(
- throwway120385 2y agoThere's a big difference between intentionally exposing a single consenting person to a modified pathogen for the purpose of giving them resistance and intentionally releasing a modified pathogen into the environment and allowing it to spread by its usual vector to the consenting and unconsenting alike without any regard. If this were a virus created using gain of function research we would call it a biological weapon. But because the intent is different we're supposed to be excited and accepting of it? The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
- ben_w 2y agoAlthough I agree that medical consent is important and the road to hell is so paved: > But because the intent is different we're supposed to be excited and accepting of it? One could say that it's the intent which varies between a heart transplant and an Azrec blood sacrifice.
- nancybelowzero 2y agoI had this idea when I was 7. I would spend all day outside and get tons of mosquito bites, but also sometimes I would go to the doctor to get shots. They seemed to me to be not entirely different things, so I would wonder why they couldn't just put the shots into mosquitos, since they didn't hurt as much. And it turns out, you can!
- therein 2y ago[flagged]
- nancybelowzero 2y agoAt 7, I don't believe I consented to the mosquitos or the shots.
- therein 2y ago[flagged]
- wizzwizz4 2y agoIt's only a mystery if you choose to remain ignorant of it. We are having a discussion on the largest information-sharing system in the history of our species: not all information is available online, but a lot is!
- therein 2y agoMy god what a simple take. Information Superhighway saves the day, yes. The future is now, information at our fingertips lest you choose to remain ignorant. I'd love to have the innocence that you have. A world where nobody has any ulterior motives.
- dekhn 2y agoThey did- people bitten by a mosquito do receive some amount of blood from previous individuals.
- rvz 2y agoWhat was once a conspiracy theory is now longer one.
- chaosbolt 2y agoEventually we'll be able (as in it will be possible) to pinpoint some "contrarian" gene, then make something that only kills these individuals, and put it into mosquitoes. Now if it's possible to do then obviously some government somewhere will do it (eventually), and no one will notice anything, say it's something that gives you a heart attack, and say we see a spike in heart attacks in 2050, it won't even be that significant since contrarian individuals are few, and just like that after a year the population will be a lot more docile. It's still a sci-fi scenario now but it's scary to think about what the future will hold.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoWe can do basically this today. I could probably do it, if I decided to throw my entire life away (which, if I'm considering killing, is the minimum bar anyway) – though, not reliably and not without side effects. For an organisation of significant size, it's a question of how sophisticated they'd want to be. The main obstacle to your sci-fi scenario is that, to date, no such "contrarian gene" has been identified. In fact, most traits you'd want to genocide away seem tenuously related to particular alleles, at best. Unless we start seeing fanatical HERC2 purists, or the people making bioweapons decide they don't care about collateral in the War Against Redheads, we're probably safe from genetically-selective mosquito-induced heart attacks.
- kelipso 2y agoI think contrarian just means high IQ lol. Also hard to test genetically. No offense!
- artistic_regard 2y ago[flagged]
- mike_hearn 2y agoA few years ago I found myself chatting to a guy who had worked as a software engineer-turned malarial epidemiologist at a well known UK university. He told me he had "run away screaming" from that field and switched a different one because he was so shocked by what he saw in the field of malaria research. As he explained it, the big problem is the field's dependence on funding from the Gates Foundation. Philanthropic funding isn't bad per se but the issue is that Gates specifically wants a legacy. That means he's not really interested in funding mitigation, he's only interested in eradication. A lot of researchers in the field think eradication isn't practical, but they keep their views private because you have to be gung-ho about eradication if you want access to the BMG Foundation funding stream. He said the result is a lot of grant proposals that are deliberately either vague or deceptive so money intended for eradication efforts can get spent on more useful stuff. Beyond creating a culture where researchers routinely misrepresent their work and views, he told me the bigger problem was that it caused them to take extreme risks. Prototypical example: blanket spray an area with anti-malarial drugs. If it works then hooray, you eradicated malaria from that area. Until it returns, that is. But if it doesn't work then you just bred a new strain of malaria that's resistant to all known medications. It's the same problem as over-use of antibiotics. A malaria vaccine delivered by mosquito sounds like the exact problem he was talking about, except times a million. One problem that can occur with vaccines - that gets drowned out and censored by the public health lobby and its allies - is that they can cause displacement rather than eradication. In other words you successfully vaccinate against one strain of the pathogen, but then it mutates under selection pressure to dodge immune systems that are "overfitted" to the prior strain. When invaded by the new strain the body doesn't recognize quickly enough that its antibodies no longer dock correctly, and so it spends a lot of time creating those when it should be trying to find new antibodies instead. This problem is sometimes called immune imprinting, OAS or some other names and it's especially nasty because it misleads researchers doing drug trials. They develop a very targeted test against a pathogen (PCR or so), they make a vaccine against it, they vaccinate a trial population, the test drops to zero so they roll it out to the wider population. Success! Except then some years later some assholes point out that mortality didn't actually drop in that targeted population. All that happened is the pathogen mutated to the point neither the test nor the immune system recognize it, and so people are just getting sick with the variant instead. Unfortunately, awareness of this problem is very low because anyone who points it out is immediately targeted for cancellation and censorship for being an "anti-vaxxer" (they aren't anti-vaccine, they just want vaccines that are broad spectrum enough to actually achieve mortality reductions). Also public health institutions, having rolled out a vaccine, are loathe to admit in public it was all for nothing as they fear that it would lower compliance in future campaigns. All this is a long way of saying THIS IS BAD DON'T DO IT. The risk is real that it backfires in ways that break existing anti-malarial drugs, the funding situation creates strong incentives to ignore this risk, and there's a history of it happening and then being swept under the rug.
- acyou 2y agoFor those interested, I would suggest checking out Spillover by David Quammen. It goes into detail on why eradicating/eliminating zoonotic diseases isn't really feasible without also eradicating the host populations. I stumbled onto it and read it early on during SARS-CoV-2, it will give you a new perspective on the management of disease in general. As for eradicating host populations/mosquitoes, it's not the greatest idea. Ecosystems are complicated and don't generally benefit from that sort of interference. Maybe if it's a recently invasive species, sure, as long as other species don't get inadvertently by-caught. Drastically simplifying - birds need to eat too, and they tried to do this style of ecosystem management in the past and it has had brutally adverse effects for ecosystem stability. I think that this is an incredible development, but also seems kind of destabilizing. It's hard to say without seeming or being callous, that it seems good now, but we need to try to predict outcomes far into the future. That is to say - people think they are smart to have done it, and yeah it's doable, but is it really such a great idea to throw such a series of proverbial monkey wrenches into our proverbial biological engines?
- BugsJustFindMe 2y ago> As for eradicating host populations/mosquitoes, it's not the greatest idea...birds need to eat too This is a false dichotomy. Malaria is transmitted by only specific and very small subset of mosquitoes. There would still be plenty of mosquitoes if you eliminate the ones that cause unimaginably massive population harm.
- blastro 2y agoFalse equivalency, perhaps? Big assumption that all mosquito sub-species affect their environment in the same way.
- BugsJustFindMe 2y agoWe know that they share predators. We know that they share environments. We know that they share impact patterns. We also know that more than half a million people die from malaria every year.
- yapyap 2y agoIrony
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoWait until the anti-vaxxers hear about this. The anti-mosquito movement is gonna be wild. "The government is controlling bugs!!!"
- WaitWaitWha 2y agoThe concept and rumination over delivering bio-weapons in similar fashion is not unheard of. Just the top of my head - Unit 731 plague-infested fleas and "Operation Cherry Blossoms" in Japan, Operation Big Buzz" (1955) and "Operation Drop Kick" (1956), "Биопрепарат" (1974) in the USSR, and history of chucking plague-infected corpses (flying dead cows anyone?) in siege warfare.
- greenleafone7 2y agoHows your ninth mega booster shot going? Maybe if you also try having your hair pink and adding some mandatory pronouns will help the vaccine even more.
- wizrrd 2y agoAnd what happens if a genetically modified parasite mutates again in the wild?
- theultdev 2y ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> what happens if a genetically modified parasite mutates again in the wild? It would likely turn into the status quo: a bastard disease spread by mosquitoes.
- jaekwon 2y ago[flagged]
- flufluflufluffy 2y agoTell that to the families of the hundreds of thousands of people who die from malaria every year, the vast majority of which live in third world countries where finding adequate treatment or traditional vaccination is either impossible or highly difficult/costly.
- jaekwon 2y ago[flagged]
- flufluflufluffy 2y ago[flagged]
- jaekwon 2y ago[flagged]
- nathas 2y agoHear hear. Everyone arguing against this seems to want the permanent, forever solution. There isn't one. This isn't software - it's reducing harm over time as best we can, and it's a fight that will take approximately the rest of human time. The argument that we created a bioweapon is like... and? We also have nerve agents and gas and nukes. It's like everyone posting here exists in some other reality where they never talked to another human in a grocery store. We all get along as best we can.
- volkk 2y agoi would pay so much money to never hear another one of the trite reddit retorts around russian bots as soon as someone hears something they disagree with
- nathas 2y agoGood news, I haven't been on reddit for years. The bots are real, regardless of what either of our opinions are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ5XN_mJE8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ5XN_mJE8Y It's odd when certain topics - vaccines being one of them - come in with a flurry of comments when it isn't even highly upvoted. Especially when you have some drivel as the top comment saying Gates flew on the "lolita express" and some link to Prince Phillip. Ooookay? What about the article?
- volkk 2y agoi don't disagree that bots/bad actors are a problem. but it's futile to call everyone a bot since it shuts down literally all discussion. at this point just accept that the internet is the wild west and act with discretion. it helps when you dissect an idea based only on the idea and not the operator behind it. that's how i've changed my internet usage and it's helped immensely. most of the time it's obvious since bots are dumb or generally made by dumb people. but the smarter more intricate bad actors that argue in bad faith in lieu of being paid or what have you, you'll simply never tell apart since they're just humans. at that point all you have left is your wits and i prefer to train my wits on all kinds of ideas thrown my way and accept the fact that there are a lot of types of opinions in the US (where i live) and that it doesn't mean the person making a point of contention is a bot.
- jaekwon 2y ago[flagged]
- jajko 2y agoI would say something about forest and trees. But its funny how truth seems to eventually find its way, be it after a week or few centuries. Future captains of industries - take note and don't fuck up like this thinking all is fine and you are above retribution, because this will be your ultimate legacy. Find a punching bag, blowup doll, take VR glasses, do extreme sports, whatever works for you. Its extremely hard to hide truth completely and forever in modern world, maybe even impossible. I love it.
- jaekwon 2y agoYup. "Luciferians" don't understand the nature of light.
- pesus 2y agoSpamming this comment all over isn't going to make it sound any less unhinged or off-topic.
- jaekwon 2y ago[flagged]
- pesus 2y agoI'm not going to engage with this person anymore, for their own sake. I hope they get the help they need. For anyone else reading this: if you have a loved one in your life that starts acting this way (unable to comprehend what people are saying, making connections to things that aren't there, having trouble distinguishing reality from their thoughts, etc), please try to get them some help. Schizophrenia and related ailments often don't appearing until a person is in their 20s, and they're no joke.
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- pcdoodle 2y ago[flagged]
- jaekwon 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pcdoodle 2y agoThanks man, its refreshing to see some signal through the noise here. This website has some cool content but discussion is heavily influenced / steered by PR firm(s).
- Night_Thastus 2y agoWhat exactly was censored?
- pcdoodle 2y agoEvery single viewpoint that doesn't align with the interests of those playing around with bleeding edge of dumb ideas in the name of science and perceived future shareholders.
- greenleafone7 2y agoThere is re**ed and then there is this!
- major505 2y agoI could not read the whole article because It wanted me to create a account, but it seens very Unethical, inoculating people without their knowledge... .
- blagie 2y agoYou regularly get inject people with unknown DNA and mRNA without their consent, e.g. sneezing at work. It's much more ethical to do this with something tested for safety than with the newest flues, colds, and covids spreading. That's not to mention RSV, HSV, HPV, and all the others, as well as unknown diseases. Unless you continue to mask and take similar precautions, you have no basis for this assertion. The things you spread have had no safety testing, and in many cases, lead to specific impacts like long covid, increased age-related mental decline, increased odds of cancer, and others.
- postepowanieadm 2y agoInformed consent is an essential pre-condition to providing immunization.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Informed consent is an essential pre-condition to providing immunization Why does the consent need to be collected individually? We don't even require collective sign off for the factory fumes we each breathe daily. It seems reasonable for a government to consent on behalf of its governed for something like public health.
- jakebasile 2y agoYou may want to look into the Doctor's Trial at Nuremberg for why governments cannot be trusted to make decisions for citizens in the name of "public health".
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> may want to look into the Doctor's Trial at Nuremberg for why governments cannot be trusted to make decisions for citizens in the name of "public health" The Nuremberg trials are about why governments and people cannot be trusted, period. This isn't about trust. It's about what requires individual consent, and for what groups can consent collectively. When medicine is individually administered, best practice is informed consent. But when substances are collectively administered (or removed), and this ranges from water sanitation to fluoridation to mandated fortification to factory pollutants you get to breathe, we have deep precedents that say it's fine to ask the group together and skip individual consent. That doesn't mean this is fine. (The risk-reward seems skewed to the left when eradication of malaria-carrying species is on the table.) The argument is simply flawed. We simply do not get individual consent every time an artificial substance is introduced into peoples' bodies.
- jakebasile 2y agoJust because consent is routinely violated doesn't make the consent violation at hand OK.
- krtaxng 2y agoUsing mosquitoes to deliver mandatory COVID "vaccines" (which do not prevent infection or transmission) was considered a "far right" conspiracy theory in 2022. The next step is there.
- gherard5555 2y agoThis could give some bad ideas to some peoples...
- AIFounder 2y ago[dead]
- abctx 2y agohttp://archive.today/JRAWb http://archive.today/JRAWb