Any competent virologist could make a vaccine resistant, contagious, highly lethal to humans virus.
This is constantly repeated on here, and it’s wrong.
Virologists can’t do that. Not quickly, not confidently, and even less if they want it to be universally lethal.
Biology is messy and strange, unexpected things happen. You don’t find out about those things until you test, and sometimes you don’t find out until you test at scale. You cannot predict them with computer simulations, at least unless you have already converted the entire planet to computronium. You can’t model everything that’s going on with the virus in one host, let alone if you have to care about interactions with the rest of the world… which you do. And anything you do won’t necessarily play out the same on repeated tries.
You can sometimes say “I expect that tweaking this amino acid will probably make the thing more infectious”, and be right. You can’t be sure you’re right, nor know how much more infectious, unless you try it. And you can’t make a whole suite of changes to get a whole suite of properties, all at the same time, with no intermediate steps.
You can throw in some manual tweaks, and also let it randomly mutate, and try to evolve it by hothouse methods… but that takes a lot of time and a significant number of hosts.
90 percent lethality is much harder than 50. 99 is much harder than 90.
The more of the population you wipe out, the less contact there is to spread your plague… which mean that 100 percent is basically impossible. Not to mention that if it’s really lethal, people tend to resort to drastic measures like shutting down all travel. If you want an animal vector or something to get around that sort of thing, you’ve added another very difficult constraint.
Vaccine resistance, and even natural immunity resistance, tend to depend on mutations. The virus isn’t going to feel any obligation to evolve in ways that are convenient for you, and your preferred strains can get outcompeted. In fact, too much lethality is actually bad for a virus in terms of reproductive fitness… which is really the only metric that matters.
This is constantly repeated on here, and it’s wrong.
Virologists can’t do that. Not quickly, not confidently, and even less if they want it to be universally lethal.
Biology is messy and strange, unexpected things happen. You don’t find out about those things until you test, and sometimes you don’t find out until you test at scale. You cannot predict them with computer simulations, at least unless you have already converted the entire planet to computronium. You can’t model everything that’s going on with the virus in one host, let alone if you have to care about interactions with the rest of the world… which you do. And anything you do won’t necessarily play out the same on repeated tries.
You can sometimes say “I expect that tweaking this amino acid will probably make the thing more infectious”, and be right. You can’t be sure you’re right, nor know how much more infectious, unless you try it. And you can’t make a whole suite of changes to get a whole suite of properties, all at the same time, with no intermediate steps.
You can throw in some manual tweaks, and also let it randomly mutate, and try to evolve it by hothouse methods… but that takes a lot of time and a significant number of hosts.
90 percent lethality is much harder than 50. 99 is much harder than 90.
The more of the population you wipe out, the less contact there is to spread your plague… which mean that 100 percent is basically impossible. Not to mention that if it’s really lethal, people tend to resort to drastic measures like shutting down all travel. If you want an animal vector or something to get around that sort of thing, you’ve added another very difficult constraint.
Vaccine resistance, and even natural immunity resistance, tend to depend on mutations. The virus isn’t going to feel any obligation to evolve in ways that are convenient for you, and your preferred strains can get outcompeted. In fact, too much lethality is actually bad for a virus in terms of reproductive fitness… which is really the only metric that matters.