Yeah, still not buying it.

Novichok class nerve agents are at least eighty times more lethal than VX nerve agents yet the Skirpals are both alive? And look at the picture in the link. There's two bunny suits maybe thirty meters away from press and public.

Let me rephrase that last bit: There's a bunch of press and public standing about thirty meters away from a purported high concentration of one of the world's deadliest substances and none of them are dead.

This whole thing is just bullshit.

Novichok class nerve agents are at least eighty times more lethal than VX nerve agents yet the Skirpals are both alive? And look at the picture in the link. There's two bunny suits maybe thirty meters away from press and public.

VX was used in a busy airport, yet the only fatality was the person who had it smeared in his face.

You're almost there to see what I'm seeing.

VX is not as lethal as Novichok. Yet VX killed Lil' Kim's brother.

The Skirpals had direct skin contact with Novichuk yet they're still alive?

A drop of that shit smaller than the period at the end of this sentence is 100% lethal.

Yet from what I've been able to fathom they were exposed to at least .5ml of it.

Uh-huh.

Scientists at the Moscow lab told the story of one man who was exposed to Novichok No. 5 in 1987.

He was a physicist at the lab, and one day the ventilator broke down in the room where he was working.

He staggered out of the room, his vision seared by brilliant colors and hallucinations. He collapsed, and the KGB took him to a hospital.

By the time he arrived his breathing was labored. In another hour, his heart would have stopped. His entire nervous system was gradually ceasing to function.

The physicist was lucky. The hospital he was taken to, the Sklifosovsky Institute, includes the nation's top center for poison treatment.

But the scientist was at the edge of death, unaware of his surroundings, for 10 days. He couldn't walk for six months. He was dogged by depression and an inability to concentrate. He found it difficult even to read. To this day his arms are still weak, and he has never been able to return to work.

Although he survived, the gas left him with permanent disabilities.

Dr. Vedernikov said that saving one man, though difficult, was not impossible. But if a nerve gas were used on a battlefield, he said, there would be thousands of casualties.

"I would be too late with everyone. If I were right there, I could help one or two. After an hour, everyone else would be in an acute state. All I could do would be to forgive their sins."

The physicist was lucky. The hospital he was taken to, the Sklifosovsky Institute, includes the nation's top center for poison treatment.

Yet somehow they immediately diagnosed Novichuk exposure and performed a complex series of treatments? I say that because mere atropine isn't going to do much against the variants of Novichuk that were specifically designed to make standard atropine treatments futile.

Seriously, how is a nice but typical NHS hospital going to perform on par with a Russian specialty hospital that knew exactly what they were dealing with from the outset?

It doesn't make sense.

Treatment for sarin and VX exposure involves giving atropine to block the effects of acetylcholine, pralidoxime to restore the activity of the acetylcholinesterase enzyme, and diazepam to stop convulsions. Ventilation is often required to help victims breathe.