Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/11/putin-names-russia-coronavirus.html
…
5 Likes
It’s name sounds like a grey market energy drink made in a shoddy and shady eastern european factory.
19 Likes
Q: Wait, what happened with Sputniks I through IV?
A: Quiet, idiot. You don’t want to end up like Putin’s other four children, do you?
42 Likes
Depends on your take on Putin as a Bond Villain.
Is he negligently evil, where he just wants to be rich and doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process?
Or is he out to destroy the world, with a fake “vaccine” which infects the planet with an even more deadly virus?
6 Likes
I don’t want to sound like an anti-vaxer but these covid vaccines are rushed, and completely new technology. Some of them seem to take an indirect, procedural approach to building the immune response in situ. I think they should be extensively tested before being used in the wild, so to speak.
19 Likes
a move Moscow compared to its success in the Cold War-era space race.
Better to compare it to the war against Hitler and call it “Stalingrad”: throwing human bodies at a problem to die or get maimed until the tide is turned.
Although if the rumours of the orbiting mausoleum capsules for unknown cosmonauts who never returned are true, maybe the space race is an appropriate metaphor after all.
19 Likes
Worst-timeline prediction: The vaccine works perfectly and Putin rubs it in everyone’s face for the rest of his (un)natural life.
EDIT: This comment was not well-thought-out, and would be far from the worst scenario. Apologies for the bitterness/cynicism.
3 Likes
The Russians have obviously never watched any of the countless zombie movies where a vaccine either (A) kills the recipients, or (B) turns them into violent bloodthirsty killers.
“Look out, he’s turning Russian!” - the new catchphrase for the 21st century.
9 Likes
If that happens, I will be the first to congratulate them.
9 Likes
I, for one, welcome our Russian overlords who already developed the Ebola vaccine…err, wait…I for one welcome our Russian overlords.
Someone needs to remake Red Dawn as a pandemic apocalypse movie (preferably on Netflix, dubbed from the original German, Norwegian or Finnish).
1 Like
Putin has a Tiffany too?
17 Likes
3 Likes
I assumed they were in orbit, but I’m not sure how long the Soviets used the name (and if they kept using it after four, then this theory is wrong).
2 Likes
I understand it’s been tested on almost* 100 people - what could go wrong?
*Well, less than 100 people, anyways. It occurred to me that, given the low death rate for the virus, if you carefully picked who you exposed it to, you could just inject people with the virus, straight-up, and pretend it’s a vaccine. They’ll be (at least temporarily) immune to it, after all. It’s really no worse than what they are doing, assuming what they’ve said their doing is correct.
6 Likes
It was remade, in 2012. Never saw it.
Oh man. Now it’s even more the prologue to a zombie movie.
2 Likes
You don’t even need fiction for some horror stories.
“Severe inflammatory reactions” doesn’t even begin to describe what happened to the people who were in the trials.
10 Likes
Even if rumours were not true, there was also Soyuz 1:
Prior to launch, Soyuz 1 engineers are said to have reported 203 design faults to party leaders, but their concerns “were overruled by political pressures for a series of space feats to mark the anniversary of Lenin’s birthday.”[4] It is not clear how much of this pressure resulted from wanting to continue beating the United States in the Space Race and to have Soviets first on the Moon, or to take advantage of the recent setbacks in the U.S. space program with the Apollo 1 disaster.
9 Likes
If I learned anything from iZombie, it is that mixing energy drinks with viral outbreaks is a bad move.
4 Likes
