I believe we can be reasonably certain of the aforementioned pathogens are kept stored in various Laboratories, ostensibly so they can begin to manufacture vaccines should the need arise?

As for frozen pathogens emerging from formerly permanently frozen waste? We are assured by the climate science deniers and fossil fuel mega barons, that this can never ever happen?

And nearly as comforting as the knowledge that both tobacco and asbestos are either benign or harmless!

And given many pathogens particularly viruses are destroyed by exposure to extreme cold, ultraviolet, oxygenation, who knows, they could be right?

On the other hand, bacterial infections like the bubonic plague may survive indefinitely in extreme cold?

Interestingly, exposure related immunity to the latter may be transferred genetically and as acquired immunity, give the carriers some inherited protection from other pathogens like HIV perhaps?

Similarly surviving exposure to various other pathogens, even Smallpox or near relative, if less lethal or harmful cow pox may confer some genetically transferable immunity?

That said, some of the war plan scenarios and the unbelievable calloused indifference of those who think up the most cost effective ways to exterminate the masses, beggars belief!

And apparently includes the use of mass extermination neutron bombs exploded at great height to irradiate everything and turn the desert sands into a layer of volcanic glass; and eradicate all life including smallpox and that buried/cowering in usually safe bunkers, which instead become grave sites?

In the event of smallpox escaping the laboratory? Perhaps the foregoing scenario becomes the fall back fail safe position?
Alan B

My doctor ( peace be upon him and his scalpel of terror) tells me that the mutant viruses may be winning. Do the radio signals to detect aliens bring back cosmic hacking scam trojans in viral DNA?
Are the hospital walls crawling with resistant bacterioidic vampire parasitic pathogens ready to go operative at a signal from Wikileak HQ ultra low frequency codes?

While smallpox can persist in scabs for quite a long time - a couple of decades perhaps - no intact smallpox has ever been extracted from anything more than a decade and a half old. Smallpox has been eradicated for more than 30 years, so it seems unlikely that there will be a sufficiently fresh sample around to infect anyone.

The comparison with anthrax is not really apt. Anthrax is spore forming and the spores are designed to survive in soil for long periods of time.

I feel this article is an attempt at fear mongering.

Smallpox can be easily overcome with immunization, and anthrax is unlikely to affect that many people in Australia.

If anthrax decimated the cattle herd in Australia, it would only do Australia a lot of good, as cattle grazing is one of the greatest environmental problems occurring in Australia.

I think the threat of smallpox and anthrax is minor compared to the threat of the USA, which is the greatest warmonger the world has ever known, and a country that continuously talks up threats, or continuously creates threats to get more sales for its military-industrial complex.

Follow the money trail.

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/356726-russian-threat-paranoia-money/

We can grow human tissue in laboratories indefinitely? And should we be so disposed, use it as living host material for any pathogen that cannot survive without a warm blooded oxygenated host?

I've no doubt that various nasties are being developed as mutations infinitely more virulent than the original pathogen and kept under a strict regime by various nations in very secret locations as a worst case scenario response?

And where no doubt they will also have hundreds of thousands of equally efficacious vaccines stored, and rolled out in hours should we find ourselves engaged in biological warfare, with any terrorist organisation?

Incidentally, most skin infections/very recently transferred pathogens? Can be treated with a multidirectional thirty second spray (absolute maximum) of liquid nitrogen on your entire naked body.

Shiver me timbers matey and shake rattle and roll, that stuff smarts so much that shocked right out of their brain, body parts, try to independently relocate to another more forgiving location! Yipe, yipe, howl!

Waterboarding? Piece of cake!
Alan B.