They seem to point to medical research to fight against diseases, rather than “biomilitary activities”.
They are dual use research. Just like research for nuclear energy is the same as research for nuclear weapons. Research for rockets is the same for icbms. It's why we are so keen on preventing iran from developing their nuclear energy program. It's why we are worried about north korea's "space" program. The same thing with cybersecurity. By learning to prevent cyberattacks, you are also learning how to carry out cyberattacks. And vice versa. You can't research against diseases/viruses/etc without procuring, creating and developing them.
Edited to replace virus with "pathogen".
Unless your primary concern is defensive against biowarfare rather than natural outbreaks...which is indeed a priority for military research h.
Production of Bacillus anthracis spores for weapons use in the Soviet Union was in progress when an accident resulted in a release of spores that killed at least 66 people:
You can try and find specific counter examples, but I think the idea that most virus research, and scientific research in general, could likely be repurposed for bad or good, is probably pretty accurate in general.
Policing "bad" science while allowing "good" science is probably an impossible task.
This is not entirely accurate. It's possible to run nuclear reactors without the capability for nuclear weapons - which, up until the collapse of Iran's deal with Western powers, was exactly what they were (meant to be) doing. You have to deliberately enrich uranium well past the point where it's useful for reactors before you start getting into weapon-making territory.
Nobody would characterise a nuclear energy plant in a Western country as a "nuclear weapons research facility", not least because the uranium involved is nowhere near weapons-grade.
Of course, no one characterizes nuclear energy plants in Western countries as nuclear weapons research facilities, but it's perfectly reasonable to say they are dual-use. This isn't limited to nuclear energy, the term is also applicable to various things such as civilian aviation, image recognition technology, advanced metallurgy, camera technology etc...
So I don't think you really disagree with who you're replying to. Yes, the facilities aren't exactly what you need, but they're a big step towards that, and generally research in the domain has a fair degree of applicability.
Any BSL4 lab can have multiple uses depending on the mission of the employees. They can easily be used as bioweapon labs, I haven't seen any good pushback on this idea.
By nobody you mean everybody, especially everybody outside of the west? It's funny how blinded we are by our false sense of moral superiority.
> not least because the uranium involved is nowhere near weapons-grade.
Last I checked, doesn't take that much technical effort or time going from "civilian" to militar/weapons grade. There are an entire class of nations classified as nuclear latent powers - about 20 or so nations who could piggy back off their "civilian" nuclear industry to nuclears weapons in weeks/months. Surprisingly, the list is made up primarily of western nations ( which nobody would characterize as having nuclear weapons research facilities ) and japan/south korea/etc.
This is absurdly untrue.
This is an error to the level of claiming that programming language research is the same as video game manual writing, and then trying to justify it as "but they both involve computers"
There is no conspiracy here unless you just want to see it.
At the time, pandemic influenza was the best guess, but the point of the platform and the program was to rapidly address any pathogen.
US has changed to a limited interpretation of what a biological weapon is, and considers non-deadly biological agents to not be bioweapons when it comes to treaties banning them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121204112835/http://www.fas.or...
The US does research into chemical and bio-weapons they do not consider to be lethal:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121119043547/http://www.fas.or...
> The U.S. Department of Defense’s Biological Threat Reduction Program collaborates with partner countries to counter the threat of outbreaks (deliberate, accidental, or natural) of the world’s most dangerous infectious diseases. The program accomplishes its bio-threat reduction mission through development of a bio-risk management culture; international research partnerships; and partner capacity for enhanced bio-security, bio-safety, and bio-surveillance measures. The Biological Threat Reduction Program’s priorities in Ukraine are to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern and to continue to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats
Where would these pathogens and toxins that need to be secured be coming from?
Bioweapons defense is pretty fuzzy, as until recently you generally had to study a strain for a long amount of time to develop and test an effective vaccine. Which means you have to have a representative strain. Which means you either need to get one... or create your best guess.
All while the environment and/or your adversary are doing god knows what out of your sight.
Miracles like a vaccine-in-a-year don't just happen. They build on decades of research and preparedness.
The two hypotheses about the origins of COVID are natural (wet market) and accidental (lab leak). Back when “The War On Terror” was the political Zeitgeist-meme, there was at least one anthrax attack (deliberate), and I remember suggestions that terrorists might also try to trigger foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks or algal blooms (it may not surprise you to learn that the latter was suggested by someone looking for government funding for their existing research into algal blooms).
"Of the $41.91 million, $37.61 million was awarded to EcoHealth Alliance by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which describes its mission as “to protect the United States and its allies by enabling the DoD and international partners to detect, deter, and defeat WMD and threat networks.”"
https://nypost.com/2021/07/01/pentagon-gave-millions-to-ecoh...
I wonder why when the pandemic hit, there was literally zero useful info coming out of all these threat reduction programs?
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/16/no-white-...
I obviously don't know what the labs mentioned by the parent poster were doing but the fact that the US DoD (or any country's department of defense) does medical research should be about as surprising as the fact that they do research on explosives.
I also worked for a company which had several novel therapeutics for agents commonly used in bioweapons in their pipeline and the DoD was funding parts of that as well.
So the DOD funding research could mean it thought the research could mean it had potential as a weapon, or a defense against weapons, or was just a random thing being funded to promote basic science research.
You can't really draw a line from "This was funded by this department, so it had this intent" in US science funding.
Plus historically, there are plenty of wars where disease was more deadly than enemy combatants.