I'm out of the loop - is this 'bioerror or bioterror' considered conspiracy craziness, or actually being accepted about COVID?
More importantly, how well is it supported? I've had people whom I consider a bit conspiracy-nuts make the claim to me that COVID was engineered; specifically, that some piece of HIV DNA was inserted into a coronavirus to make it more infectious/infectious to humans. And while that's clearly something to treat with a load of skepticism in an environment with so much motivated conspiracy theorizing going on, it's not fundamentally unrealistic. More importantly still, it seems like something that an independent biologist could fairly easily confirm or deny, if they sequenced corona and did some bioforensics. A piece of HIV DNA should be easily recognized, and in my limited expertise its insertion would probably leave detectable traces of recognizable gene-edit-supporting DNA somewhere as well, which would be further highlighted by differing from original previous DNA.
The long-now foundation encourages thinking beyond the next Wall-st quarter or even a single life-space. Here, an early bet
"A bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event within a six month period starting no later than Dec 31 02020."
seems to be firmly on the side of the proponent. Some of the counter-argumentsSome of comments reflect how incredibly fast synthetic biology has advance in 2 decades
- Pool of potential perpetrators: The number of people eager for senseless destruction is small
- Multiply by the fraction with the knowledge, skill, intelligence, and discipline to engineer a superbug
- chance that the Black Hat will defeat the White Hats, namely the world's medical and epidemiological networks, who would combat an outbreak with containment, vaccines, antibiotics, etc.
- historical (ir)relevance The only successful past cases of bioterror are the Rajneeshee cult (751 cases, 0 deaths) and the Anthrax mailing (5 deaths). The Soviet-era anthrax bioweapon leak killed another 66.
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