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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

There are powers definitely working on it. "Super" just doesn't mean "kills as much people as efficiently as possible". Ability to control the destruction is a crucial feature of any weapon. In the past, this perhaps meant viruses that fizzle out quickly, so they could be deployed on enemy territory. Today, with recent breakthroughs in genetic engineering, that likely means aiming for high selectivity - targeting ethnicity or lineage.

Ultimately, people will be working on it no matter what, because bioweapons are to molecular biology as nuclear weapons are to nuclear physics. A crude and violent application of a field of knowledge of vital, cross-cutting importance to many areas of life.

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Do you have a source about people working on it?

Or is this a blacks op kind of thing so no one would admit to it publicly anyway, thus making it an unfalsifiable statement?

I don't have a source per se, just somewhat high level of confidence based on the following (weak, circumstantial) evidence:

- There was a lot of bioweapons R&D done in the XX century[0]; it all seems to have been abandoned between the 70s and the 90s, but since the desire for it is not gone, it would be atypical for humanity if it really all ended;

- Biological sciences keep progressing; each year, developing bioweapons is easier than it was the year before, and since our control over biological systems grow, so (I believe) the allure of a controlled bioweapon.

- You have people like John Sotos - Intel's Chief Medical Officer and a colonel in the Air National Guard - delivering talks like [1], going all serious about the threat of future bioweapons. He seems to think that this is a real danger.

- My general tried and true heuristic that if something is within realms of technological feasibility and promises a clear economic or political benefit, it will be attempted, no matter how horrible it is.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_warfare#List_of_BW_...

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY

"Did China Steal Coronavirus From Canada And Weaponize It?"

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/did-china-steal-coron...

From the article:

"In March 2019 ... a shipment of exceptionally virulent viruses from Canada’s NML ended up in China. The event caused a major scandal with Bio-warfare experts questioning why Canada was sending lethal viruses to China. Scientists from NML said the highly lethal viruses were a potential bio-weapon.

Following investigation, the incident was traced to Chinese agents working at NML. Four months later in July 2019, a group of Chinese virologists were forcibly dispatched from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory (NML). The NML is Canada’s only level-4 facility and one of only a few in North America equipped to handle the world’s deadliest diseases, including Ebola, SARS, Coronavirus, etc."

> Lab-made coronavirus related to SARS can infect human cells.

https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...

Two of the researchers are from Wuhan Biosafety Lab (Zhengli-Li Shi & Xing-Yi Ge).

This is a good question. The answer is pretty definitive, that yes, this is a thing that superpowers have been confirmed to do in the past. There's much less to go on about current work, but we can look at the type of specialized equipment that is getting built or purchased by various nations and make inferences, and trust that intelligence agencies are making substantiated conclusions. To excerpt from a Congressional Research Service report[0] in 2008:

"No nation publicly acknowledges either an offensive biological weapons (BW) program or stockpile. Examination of unclassified sources indicates that several nations are considered, with varying degrees of certainty, to have some BW capability. These are: China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and Taiwan."

The most data exists on the Soviet Union. Defectors from the soviet union had a lot to say about Biopreparat.[1] Not all of the rumors have been substantiated, but they did have a number of incidents that strongly suggest they had the souped up versions of several agents defectors claimed they did like anthrax[2], smallpox[3] and marburg[4]. In particular, the smallpox incident[3] that occurred had a high percentage of cases that progressed to the hemorrhagic form which indicates unusual virility in the strain.

There is also evidence of at least ongoing research on those agents. One researcher at vector died in 2004 from pricking herself with a needle filled with Ebola[5]. Whether that's offensive in nature is very difficult to determine. However there's definitely some transparency issues that have increased with time at this facility after a change in leadership in ~2004 or 2005.

[0] http://usiraq.procon.org/sourcefiles/CRS_2-20-08.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopreparat

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_smallpox_incident

[4] Placeholder. Having a hard time finding where the info on Dr. Ustinov came from. This might be worth a read: https://weaponews.com/history/65348565-strain-u-the-tragedy-...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/25/world/russian-scientist-d...

Most subject matter experts seem pretty convinced this is happening.

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