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The Demon
in the Freezer by Richard Preston Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Dark Biology Before you line up for your smallpox
vaccine, read Robert Preston’s new book, The Demon
in the Freezer. Preston tells a story of the perils of modern dark
biology, with special emphasis on smallpox, including the scientists who
eradicated the disease worldwide, the decision to keep samples of the disease
on ice, and the scientists who are modifying the disease today into strains
that the current vaccine won’t immunize us from. Here’s a sample (p. 93): “In 1991, the WHO had two hundred
million doses of frozen smallpox vaccine in storage in the Gare Frigorifique
in downtown Geneva. This was the world's primary stockpile of smallpox
vaccine. The vaccine stockpile was costing the WHO twenty-five thousand
dollars a year in storage costs, largely for the electricity to run the
freezers. In 1991, an advisory panel of experts known as the Ad Hoc Committee
on Orthopoxvirus Infections recommended that 99.75 percent of the vaccine
stockpile be destroyed, in part to save on electricity costs. Since the
disease had been eradicated, there was no need for the vaccine. The vaccine
was taken out of the freezers, sterilized in an oven, and thrown into
Dumpsters. This move saved the WHO less than twenty-five thousand dollars a
year, and left it with a total of five hundred thousand doses of smallpox
vaccine. That is less than one dose of the vaccine for every twelve thousand
people on earth. The WHO has no plans to increase its stockpile now, since
replacing the lost quantity would cost a half-billion dollars, and it doesn't
have the money. According to several independent sources. Lev Sandakhchiev
was in charge of a research group at Vector in 1990 that devised a more efficient
way to mass-produce warhead-grade smallpox in industrial scale pharmaceutical
tanks. In 1994—three years after the British and American bioweapons
inspectors toured Vector and were told by Sandakhchiev that there was no
smallpox there—his people built a prototype smallpox bioreactor and allegedly
tested it with variola major. The reactor is a three-hundred-gallon tank that
looks something like a hotwater heater with a maze of pipes around it. It
sits on four stubby legs inside a Level 4 hot zone in the middle of Corpus 6,
on the third floor of the building. The reactor was filled with plastic beads
on which live kidney cells from African green monkeys were growing. Vector
scientists would pump the reactor full of cell-nutrient fluid and a little
bit of smallpox. The reactor ran at the temperature of blood. In a few days, variola
would spread through the kidneys cells, and the bioreactor would become
extremely hot with amplified variola, whereupon the liquid inside the reactor
could be drawn off in pipes and frozen. In biological terms, the liquid was
hot enough to have global implications.” After reading Preston’s book, I decided to skip the
shot, since I was persuaded by one of his theses: smallbox as a weapon is
more likely to be a modified version, not the disease for which we have a
vaccine. The ability of biologists to modify the disease makes any pretension
of safety through inoculation somewhat ludricuous. If you want more than
smallpox from a scary non-fiction book, there’s plenty of information about
anthrax to sate your appetitie when you read The Demon
in the Freezer. Steve Hopkins, December 23, 2002 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the January 2003
issue of Executive
Times For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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