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by dukeofdoom 1115 days ago
Do we really know what the current capabilities are. It would be top secret. It's been decades of research. I would expect many of these issues have been worked around.

I used to think AI was fictional pipe dream. Yet it came to be.

> 1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities.

Yet the covid vaccine was manufactured in huge quantities in short time.

> 2. It's hard to store biological agents for long periods of time, since living things tend to die.

The covid vaccine was kept cold storage of -60, and it was good for 18 months.

>3. It's hard to disperse biological agents over a large area.

This would not be an issue for a respiratory virus, that targets a specific ethnic group.

> 4. It's easy to protect troops in the field from biological agents and all major countries maintain and exercise the capability to do so.

Yet almost everyone got infected by covid.

> 5. Biological agents are slow acting and unreliable in their effect.

Covid was fast acting. Yet not that deadly. So i suppose if it was more deadly this too would fall.

3 comments

targeting a specific ethnic group would be extremely challenging. afaik, ethnicity is actually responsible for surprisingly little genetic variation. maybe you could e.g. come up with a spike protein that's 25% better at binding an ACE2 receptor variant that 80% of ethnic group X has vs. only 30% of ethnic group Y, but that's not going to make Y immune.
We do have the results of the South African chemical and biological weapons program in clear: https://css.ethz.ch/en/services/digital-library/articles/art... And they certainly did not come out with such lists out of the blue.
The problem with #3 is that viruses will happily evolve and hop species. Covid for example spread to farmed mink, then to wild populations. Even random zoo animals were catching it.