XPost: rec.arts.sf.fandom, rec.arts.sf.written
From: wthyde1953@gmail.com
Keith F. Lynch wrote:
> Mike Van Pelt wrote:
>> Nobody gets vaccinated against smallpox any more, since the virus
>> is extinct. In the wild. I grimly await some (long string of
>> weapons-grade expletives) to break that out of the freezer and
>> inflict it on the world again.
>
> That may not be the only way it can happen. At a book signing I asked
> James Watson if a terrorist could synthesize smallpox, given that its
> complete genome is in the open literature. He said no, but he looked
> very uncomfortable when answering, so I'm skeptical.
>
> A few weeks later, Keith Marshall (a fellow local SF fan) asked me if
> I was the one who asked him that. It turned out that the event was
> carried via radio, and he was listening, and recognized my voice.
>
>> ... also got the vaccines for Covid and all boosters, pneumonia,
>> RSV, the yearly flu shot... and due to a business trip to India,
>> hepatitis and typhus.
>
> Covid is the only thing I've been vaccinated for in this century.
>
> I've never had a flu shot,
In middle age I had the flu for seven consecutive years, and serious
cases too. Being the ultra-fast thinker that I am, I had an idea:
"What if I get a flu shot?". In the more than a quarter century since
then I've had no serious cases of the flu, and only a very few mild ones.
and never had the flu. Or a cold, at least
> as an adult.
Now I seethe with envy!
I managed to avoid any respiratory infection from the onset of Covid
until last fall. So far I've had a cold for about 75% of this calendar
year. It's really interfering with my intensive program of doing nothing.
William Hyde
--- SoupGate-DOS v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
