Ready to do… nothing?

Doubt

Ehhhhh… On one hand, I think that most novel diseases will probably play out like COVID has. It’s hard, but all they have to do is be fucking competent and message people consistently enough that it’s hard(er) for grifters to wiggle in. On the other, the worst case scenario is the accidental (or otherwise) release of something that’s already adapted to us that we’ve stopped being immunized for/ infected by. There’s still two countries, IIRC, that publicly admit to having smallpox samples, and that’s the US and Russia (because of course it is). What’s more is that the gene sequence is publicly available, and synthesizing the smallpox DNA sequence from scratch is something that’s well within the scope of a state level actors with a decent life sciences program. If, for whatever reason, smallpox got out, we are NOT ready for it. The US DOES have a stockpile of smallpox vaccines and some domestic production capacity for them, but that stuff is hard (slow) to ramp up. Smallpox is both highly transmissible and highly virulent (virulence is how sick it makes you), and the number of people who have immunity against it these days is probably the lowest it’s been in recorded history. A lot of people will just flat out die in the interim.