Should extremely deadly viruses like small pox be kept captive, or destroyed forever and left extinct?
Of course, but then a lot of things can be misused in the wrong hands. The small pox strain being held in deep freeze security unfortunately needs to be preserved exactly for that reason. Small pox doesn’t exist in the wild, humans are the only reservoirs- which is how they were able to eliminate it through the vaccination campaigns. But should the wrong hands ever happen to actually develop a dangerous altered strain, we’d need them to develop the vaccines for those currently with no immunity at all. The best defense for most of the world would depend on that, and if we destroyed those stores we would not have the ability. And there is always a slim chance that we haven’t actually totally eliminated it, and it could lay lurking frozen up in an ice cube somewhere in Antarctica. As long as it stays frozen, we haven’t got a problem- but if global warming ever thaws it out we could face an epidemic. Then again, the frozen stores would literally save our human buns. So yes, there is the ri
