[acidoverride]

It would likely backfire, but not by literally shooting yourself in the foot.

If the virus is indiscriminate, and still useful as a weapon, then the host country weaponizing it, will have an anti-dote or vaccination at the ready. When the virus finds its way back to your country, your citizens are already immune.

But coronavirus can be made to discriminate. Militaries have been researching gene-targeted coronaviruses. They can just plug the data people volunteer to Chinese DNA-testing companies into a supercomputer and create a virus which discriminates on race and age, before deciding who to make really ill.

[adrianN]

I know of no natural virus that discriminates based on race and I suspect it's really hard to find a smallish set of genes that let you discern, say, Europeans from Russians with high accuracy. I'd like to see some papers about gene-targeted viruses, because I don't believe that they're realistic.