Pneumonia is just a lung infection, so I imagine there's a number of ways you can make a person to unknowingly inhale something.

However, it looks way too complicated for a plot. There are many tried and proven methods of getting rid of people. Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works - we know about a lot of cases where people were assassinated (of course, we may also not know about many, but I think we have a good sample). Among those, we have a lot of ways it can be done - shootings, stabbings, explosions, poisons, drownings, falling from heights, whatever - but I can't remember any case where a biological agent were used. And thinking about it - biological agents are hard to produce, hard to handle, unstable, unpredictable in use, can't be properly targeted, why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?

So while it does look suspicious on its face, I'd have hard time believing it's an example of an assassination.

> Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works

This is pretty similar to the old argument about why mass surveillance is unlikely to be happening - we're just not that good at keeping secrets. Seems like a pretty safe bet that there's good spooks who are good at hiding their works.

> we know about a lot of cases where people were assassinated (of course, we may also not know about many, but I think we have a good sample). Among those, we have a lot of ways it can be done

Let's not forget about survivorship bias. You only know about the assassinations you know about. You don't know about the assassinations that were successfully kept secret.

> This is pretty similar to the old argument about why mass surveillance is unlikely to be happening - we're just not that good at keeping secrets.

Not a great example since we know for a fact that mass surveillance is happening. The U.S. Congress just voted to extend and expand it.

I believe that was indeed their point. People used to dismiss mass surveillance of the US on its people as a crackpot conspiracy theory, until the full extent of it was revealed by Snowden.

Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Just a handful though.

By "people" you mean "some people" and there are always some people. For as long as I've been alive the predominant public opinion has been that mass surveillance does take place. We've had evidence for that decades before Snowden got specific about the NSA's abilities.

Snowden is a great example of how hard it is to keep things secret when they are real.

> Seems like a pretty safe bet that there's good spooks who are good at hiding their works.

But that's not true - actually, we learned about the mass surveillance reasonably soon after it started. They aren't actually good at hiding. True, there was a period that somebody could say "we haven't learned about it yet so it probably doesn't exist" - which would be fallacious - but within a reasonable period of time, that option had disappeared.

Now, with assassinations, the biological weapons option has been existing for almost 100 years. If that were so common that even corporate machinators don't hesitate to use it to silence a witness of fairly low importance - we'd have heard at least a couple of cases, at least some rumors or defector reports. Just as we did with all other means of getting rid of witnesses. Since we didn't, I attribute very low probability to the possibility that this is how we learn about this being common.

> You don't know about the assassinations that were successfully kept secret.

Yes, I mentioned that in my comment. However, as I also mentioned, we have, over the years, pretty generous sample out of the mass of all assassinations. It would be rather weird if assassinations specifically using biological agents were somehow so special that while we have leaks about pretty much every other kind, we don't have any indications specifically about those. One could assume that is because this method is used only by the very best operatives going for very high-value target - but then we'd need to explain why suddenly Boeing corporates have access to it to deal with a pretty low-grade issue (and frankly I don't even see how it helps them by now - they are so deep in doo-doo anyway that one less witness is not going to save them). Such assumptions do not form a coherent picture if you look at the likelihood of the events involved.

>Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works

That's because it's the failures we learn about. Which could be 90% or 5% of "their works".

But never mind the spooks. We are also told "there's no perfect crime". Yet, less than half the murders get solved in the US, for example:

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...

Similar - the average IQ of prison inmates is lower than the general population. Which can be taken to imply that we only catch the dumb ones.

That only really holds if you assume criminal behavior is evenly distributed among the bell curve of IQ, which is is a fairly large assumption!

Not really. It depends more on how you interpret the phrase "the dumb ones." It's clear that if the IQ distribution of prisoners skews lower than the general population, then we only catch "the dumb ones" with respect to the general population. What isn't necessarily clear is that we only catch "the dumb ones" with respect to the IQ distribution of all criminals. (I don't think we even know or have any good way of determining what the IQ distribution of all criminals even is, do we?) It's just another instance where plain language can fail to be precise.

You believe that its some inferior genetically people doing the crimes?

The Russians want you to know they did it; just with plausible deniability.

They brought back the time-tested art of defenestration.

This is a good point. People here seem to be assuming that Boeing is competent at carrying out hits, which I highly doubt. We should consider whether they have actually tried it on a bunch of people.

Boeing the corporation?

These things are ordered by executives as individuals (or small groups with similar exposure), not abstract legal entities. It's not like it was decided at a board meeting, LOL.

And one would expect are carried out by people good at their jobs. After all they're paid top dollar for this service. those people have not only tried it, they have impressive resumes at it to be hired in the first place. Like how corporations in the past used to use the mob to do those things to annoying union leaders.

The murders not being solved aren't "Perfect crimes". It's a matter of resources and timing.

99% of murder investigations mostly boil down to:

1. Literally witnessed by one or more people, possibly officers or on camera. 2. They brag about it. 3. A brief investigation of friends and family where it turns out so and so always hated them and happens to have a gun, and hey look at that the ballistics match.

There are a very small number of officers in comparison to the total population (as it should be), and the vast majority of them are not the kind being assigned to homicide.

Some major % of the "unsolved" murders in the US that mostly just get thrown on the pile because they find out 2 weeks later and either can't identify the victim, or can't find enough useful information to start investigating. Forensics is very useful, but hardly as portrayed in shows like CSI, and the simple realities of "well we didn't find much, found out weeks later, and it'll be weeks before we get any lab results back" often just mean there's 10 other "no shit" murders to deal with instead.

And this isn't even on the core topic here of "could this have been a hit by Boeing", which is just insanely unbelievable, ESPECIALLY given the method. People are off handledly mentioning things like Ricin or Polonoium attacks, but the important things about those is that they are INSANELY LETHAL and extremely easy to control.

"Lets infect him with pneumonia that turns into MRSA" has got to be one of the most risky, difficult, expensive, and unreliable methods of killing someone ever.

Hell if you want deniability there's probably at least 10 or so ways to easily cause a human to have a heart attack and look like they died of natural causes as compared to some magic MRSA gun.

"Something?". Having them inhale oil or dirt will do it. Pneumonia is usually caused by a bacteria that's just everywhere (though usually on the skin), that's too simple. If it starts growing in your lungs, you can try antibiotics. If that doesn't work, well, nice knowing you.

We are surrounded by lethal bacteria. That humans survive depends on the immune system having a 100% success rate preventing bacteria from forming even a small colony in the lungs (and several other places, like the teeth, where infections can rapidly and surprisingly turn deadly)

This is why people cough so extremely hard when inhaling solid or liquid stuff in their windpipes.

Also this happens all the time. That someone dies from pneumonia is not uncommon (though for oil it's usually someone who manages to spray themselves with aerosolized oil at work). So even if an autopsy found a few specs of dirt in the lungs, and even if they actually trace that to be the cause, that's not extremely suspicious. (Plus why would they check? Obviously with a pneumonia patient you know the cause of death)

This sounds a bit like the toupee fallacy - you have never seen a good toupee, because the good ones you don't recognize as anything other than normal hair.

> why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?

So that you will think it is not suspicious

> why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?

Like... head shot in an alley? suffocating them in their sleep? drowning them in a body of water?

I think you can probably answer your question yourself if you think about it

If you're a spook for an authoritarian government, it's probably better for your work to be somewhat visible to keep the serfs in line.

> why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?

Ask Suge Knight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxPTtFv4AkM

You can assume criminals have gotten better at this type of thing since 1995

Isn’t that kind of what they’d have developed COVID for?

ricin was used BY the Soviet Union and Russia also used radioactive agents to kill someone not super long ago. And a nerve agent was used to kill someone close to Kim too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-na...

kind of the point though

I have no idea but if many decades ago they revealed this [1], at this point it's safe to assume there are much better things.

[1] https://www.military.com/video/guns/pistols/cias-secret-hear...

Do you know what the toxin was?

I'm not at all inclined to believe this is anything more than a co-incidence, but those things can definitely be induced in a way that's difficult to detect.

Not to say that I believe it happened, but there is a difference between actual cause of death and reported cause of death. As in, just because it was written down that pneumonia and stroke were involved doesn't necessarily make it true.

Again, I do not believe this happened, but that's probably how you'd do it.

MRSA [1], though? He could have been inoculated with it.

MRSA is awful, difficult or impossible to clear, and can certainly be fatal.

This could be a very diabolical way to assassinate someone.

How would you be able to trace it? It could have been laced in his food or drink. Or simply transfered by touch (got on his hands, then wiped on his face or nose). Or aerosolized as he walked by.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylo...

There are 3 million Americans unknowingly walking around with MRSA in their nose right now, all around us. It is so common I'm not sure it would be a good assassination weapon even if you tried.

It matters where the infection takes hold. If it's in the respiratory system, that's a much different disease than surface legions and boils.

MRSA is fairly common especially in hospital settings. After all, you have a setting where people are coming in sick with a disease that is hard to kill and resistant to antibiotics.

Up to 30 of us carry staph variants in our noses.

https://now.uiowa.edu/news/2013/06/be-gone-bacteria

It's also trivially easy to culture MRSA. A lot of university micro-bio classes induce anti-biotic resistance in e-coli as an experiment for under graduates.

Can confirm. I did undergraduate bio and cultured lots of different bacteria species. I even used agrobacterium (which smell like feet) to clone genes into plants.

This is easily within the reach of DIY bio folks. You just need a freezer, bath, growth serum, and other easy inputs.

I once worked with a researcher who was apparently the world's expert on giving mice strokes. Pneumonia seems more difficult.

certainly not out of reach for a determined and powerful adversary. infecting someone with a respiratory virus isn't exactly rocket science. just spraying a subperceptibly thin aerosol into someone's face should do it.

Or putting black mold in the air ducts in their home. Easy to pass off as just poor home maintenance.

You’re putting yourself at a massive risk though. This is an airborne bacteria, the “assassin” is probably going to get infected too.

What a business card

The US military used to have a stockpile of Q-fever bioweapons, that they claim to have destroyed. Q-fever can cause pneumonia.

Doubt Boeing or its spook going to use a bioweapon to off a whistleblower. Too complex, too many parties involved, too much of a trail, too high consequences if caught (i.e. terrorism), too high survival % vs. the panoply of less exotic options. It’s a Wile E. Coyote-level plot.

A fucking cold can also cause pneumonia. There are thousands of things that cause pneumonia. WTF are you talking about.

He talks about a historical factoid. He also talks about something that can induce pneumonia that's deadly, not just waiting for some common cold to turn to pneumonia in an off chance. WTF about what he is talking about was difficult to parse?

I figure there's like a 99% chance it happened naturally, and a 1% chance it was the most brilliant assasination of all time specifically because any rational person would think it's unlikely to have been one.

I think there were some heavy metal poisons (not Alice Cooper or Bret Michaels) that had symptoms of pneumonia, and the treatment for pneumonia fucked up the patient a bit.

Agreed. Being a whistleblower is probably very stressful.

Just because you don't know how it's done or aren't aware of methods for it doesn't mean it isn't possible to do for other people.

I don’t think too many spooks want to handle something as dangerous as MRSA. How do you even infect someone with that without infecting yourself in the process.

In 2020 and 2021, there was endless online discussion of airborne pathogen distribution, measurement and defense.

He had a sudden mysterious illness that caused him to have problems breathing. If this were a cover up, that illness would have been the cover up attempt, not the pneumonia. The breathing problems required the whistleblower to be intubated and he later developed pneumonia, and later still MRSA.

The pneumonia and MRSA were certainly just an unfortunate illness. The more conspiratorial can debate over if the original breathing difficulties that brought him into the hospital were the result of an assassination attempt or not. For all we know he just had Covid.

both is very easy to achieve and also kind of medically obvious

There are a lot of easy ways to give someone pneumonia, like aspiration.

There's a long history of zany ideas being looked at. I'm not inclined to conclude it's technologically feasible just from that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_bomb, for example.

Running someones immune system or poisoning them is a fantastic way to get plausible deniability. No smoking gun...

Plausible Deniability is when a person's involvement or culpability in an event might be denied, or at least mitigated, by creating a situation where they can claim ignorance or an inability to act.