> To clarify, there is greater chance of natural pandemic. I think it'd be excessively pessimistic (and very selectively so) to believe vaccine/etc. research w

> To clarify, there is greater chance of natural pandemic. I think it'd be excessively pessimistic (and very selectively so) to believe vaccine/etc. research would increase the overall chance of a pandemic. But, the idea I'm getting at is you seem to be mistakenly treating the choice of halting as not bringing uncertainty other than the relative "you don't know what you could have had" kind. Personally I'd say it's usually the inherently riskier choice than just continuing, on top of having worse expected result, but hopefully you can see that the action of halting does come with at least some uncertainty of its own. > My understanding is that diseases are classified and diagnosed by symptom, not by severity of the symptoms. That would be especially tricky as everyone will have a different reaction Symptoms also vary by person. Diagnosis can take into account a variety of factors (medical history, blood tests, etc.), including severity, to determine the most likely identification. Diseases are classified in documents like ICD-11, with mpox defined as caused by the monkeypox virus ("A disease caused by an infection with monkeypox virus [...] Confirmation is by identification of monkeypox virus") and smallpox as caused by the variola virus ("A disease caused by an infection with variola virus [...] Confirmation is by identification of the variola virus in a skin sample of the rash"). > If you consider smallpox eliminated because disease with a similar severity is no longer present then we likely have to consider Covid eliminated as well If there were extant strains of smallpox, even if less virulent, I would not consider it eradicated (but it could nonetheless be a significant success of medical advancements). I'm not aware that we've eradicated any strains of SARS-CoV-2, let alone all of them, so I see no reason to consider COVID-19 eradicated. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be suggesting that even if we did eradicate SARS-CoV-2, we shouldn't consider COVID-19 eradicated because there would still inevitably be some patients presenting with sufficiently-similar-but-less-severe symptoms from, say, influenza. > Monkeypox and smallpox have very similar symptoms, meaning they could very well be considered the same disease even if they are believed to be caused by two different viruses. I'm not aware of anywhere that equates the two diseases - they're different enough even just in symptoms (including severity) and response that it would seem counterproductive to do so. If "could very well be considered the same disease" means more in terms of "well it's all just arbitrary labels - in theory we could've chosen to classify diseases more broadly" then sure, but it doesn't really take away from the accomplishment of eradicating [the thing currently know as the smallpox disease] even if it were to no longer be known as a disease on its own.