Agreed. If it was manmade, my guess is some Chinese student did it experimenting with CRISPR. It amazes me that anyone can buy CRISPR kits to play with. Our government must be waiting for a terrorist to invent some deadly virus before it clamps down on the access to the technology. James Clapper (yes, that James Clapper) warned about the dangers years ago, but little has been down.
November 8, 2019 China’s Biotech Boom Could Transform Lives—or Destroy Them
Yet the biggest risks posed by biotech, for China, the United States, and other countries, pertain to nonstate actors. A critical feature of modern biotech, in contrast to technology like nuclear weapons, is that it’s cheap and easy to develop. A technique known as CRISPR, which the Chinese researcher He used in his illicit gene-editing work, makes it practical for just about anyone to manipulate the genomes of just about any organism they can lay their hands on. CRISPR makes it much simpler to skirt ethical restrictions and terrifyingly straightforward for terrorist groups to develop fearsome biological weapons.
Researchers have already shown it’s possible to reconstruct the smallpox virus, which was eradicated in the real world in the 1970s, for as little as $200,000 using DNA fragments you can order online. If a terrorist or rogue state were to successfully do so, virtually no one alive would have any resistance to the virus—and most stockpiles of the vaccine were destroyed long ago. There is an organization, the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, that tries to screen suspicious orders for DNA fragments that might be used to build such bioweapons. And while most of the world’s major DNA synthesis firms belong to the consortium, membership is completely voluntary, and there’s also a thriving and entirely unregulated black market—much of it based in China.
I concur with the article that non-state actors pose the biggest threat. We also know that terrorists now are using drones. Terrorists don't care much about who they kill or even if they die themselves. I think it's a matter of time before some insane terrorist group with the money tries to use drones to deliver bioweapons. It's a potential disaster waiting to happen and Congress and Ole Bone Spurs seem to be twiddling their thumbs. They seem willing to wait until disaster strikes to do anything. The matter needs addressed on an international basis the way other dangerous weapons have been dealt with.
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