That time Catherine the Great championed smallpox vaccinations

The Russian monarch’s 1787 letter calling for widespread vaccination is up for auction.

Portrait of Catherine the Great. Her 1787 letter to Count Piotr Aleksandrovich Rumiantsev—now up for auction—called for a national vaccination campaign against smallpox.

Enlarge / Portrait of Catherine the Great. Her 1787 letter to Count Piotr Aleksandrovich Rumiantsev—now up for auction—called for a national vaccination campaign against smallpox. (credit: Public domain)

During her long reign, Catherine the Great's leadership transformed Russia into a powerhouse of Europe. She was also a leader in public health policy, championing a nation-wide vaccination campaign against smallpox at a time when many viewed the practice with distrust. A letter by the Empress outlining her inoculation strategy is up for auction by MacDougall's in London. Included in the sale is a portrait of the monarch as the “Lawgiver in the Temple of Justice,” painted by Dmitri Levitsky, who was a favorite of the Russian court in the 1770s and 1780s. The two items are expected to sell for as much as $1.6 million.

As we've reported previously, the World Health Organization declared smallpox to be an eradicated disease in 1979, and many people don't remember just how devastating it could be. It began with a high fever and severe vomiting, followed by a skin rash. The victim would next develop sores, which eventually scabbed over and fell off, scarring the skin. About three in ten of those infected died, and the survivors were typically badly scarred for life, sometimes even blinded or permanently disabled.

The Chinese were inoculating people against smallpox as early as the 1500s. European physicians in the early 18th century relied upon variolation (the use of smallpox to induce immunity) to control the spread of smallpox, in which scrapings from smallpox pustules were scratched into a person's arm or inhaled through the nose. While those who received the treatment did go on to develop common smallpox symptoms like fever and rash, the death toll was significantly lower.

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Fakku Sends DMCA Takedown Request Targeting TorrentFreak

Fakku is one of the few companies that succesfully transformed a ‘pirate’ operation into a legitimate business. After this transformation, the ‘hentai’ publisher started to crack down on pirate sites. With a recent takedown request, it went too far, flagging TorrentFreak for copyright infringement.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

bad fakkuWhen Fakku launched 15 years ago, it was an aggregator for unlicensed scanlations of adult manga, also known as hentai.

The site’s founder, Jacob Grady, studied computer science in Massachusetts at the time and used student loans to pay the server bills of a site that was essentially a pirate operation.

Fakku never sought trouble with rightsholders though. It simply wanted to expand the manga niche to a broader audience by aggregating translations. That worked well as the platform kept growing.

As the years passed things got more serious and Fakku slowly but steadily signed deals with rightsholders. By the end of 2015, it had completed the transformation from a ‘pirate site’ into a licensed publisher, which is a laudable achievement.

This new role in the manga ecosystem also meant that Fakku became interested in protecting its rights. After all, you don’t want other people to profit from ‘your’ content. This meant that the publisher started to send takedown notices to pirate sites, and more.

Over the past few months, Fakku has repeatedly gone to court trying to unmask the operators of sites such as Hentai.cafe and HentaiNexus. These two domains have since disappeared.

At the same time, the publisher is sending millions of takedown notices to various online platforms. Google alone has received over 45 million takedown requests from the company since early this year. Unfortunately, not all of these are correct.

A few days ago the company sent a DMCA notice to Google asking it to remove 1,110 URLs from its search results. Most of these point to pirated content, but TorrentFreak was listed among these sites as well.

fakku DMCA TF

In fact, Fakku suggests that our news article covering the legal action against Hentai.cafe is somehow copyright infringing. We’re not aware of any wrongdoing, of course, and the “commutative” [sic] episode list provided in the takedown notice doesn’t ring any bells either.

Mistakes can happen, of course, and luckily Google stepped in and decided to keep the article in its search engine. We don’t want to make a big deal out of it really, but it would be great if Fakku could be a bit sharper going forward.

TorrentFreak asked Fakku for a comment on our findings but the company didn’t immediately reply.

Our news article isn’t the only unusual URL in the takedown notice though. We also spotted a blog post from Doujins.com, which reports on a row between Fakku and Hentai Heaven from two years ago, which appears to have been sorted out later.

That post was removed from Google’s search results, but a copy under another URL is still indexed.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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Handel mit CO2-Zertifikaten lockt Spekulanten an. Für deutsche Klimaforscher wird das erst zum Problem, wenn die Preise bewusst in die Höhe getrieben werden

Handel mit CO2-Zertifikaten lockt Spekulanten an. Für deutsche Klimaforscher wird das erst zum Problem, wenn die Preise bewusst in die Höhe getrieben werden

Klimaschutz und Klimagerechtigkeit

Allein im Gebäudesektor ist die Herausforderung, Klimaneutralität zu erreichen, gigantisch. Nichtstun wird allerdings teurer. Und energetische Sanierungen sind auch ein Jobmotor

Allein im Gebäudesektor ist die Herausforderung, Klimaneutralität zu erreichen, gigantisch. Nichtstun wird allerdings teurer. Und energetische Sanierungen sind auch ein Jobmotor