When we look at the Soviet BW program, they engaged in both “switching” (i.e. stockpiling lots of different agents) and “escalating,” (developing agents that were heat, cold, and antibiotics-resistant).
If the Soviets discovered that Americans had developed a new antibiotic against one of the bacterial agents in their stockpile, I agree that it would have been simpler to acquire that antibiotic and use it to select for a resistant strain in a dish. Antibiotics were hard to develop then, and remain difficult today.
Let’s say we’re in 2032 and a Soviet-style BW program was thinking about making a vaccine-resistant strain of Covid-19. This would have to be done with the fact in mind that their adversaries could rapidly make, manufacture, and update existing mRNA vaccines, and also had a portfolio of other vaccines against it. Any testing for the effectiveness of a vaccine and the infectiousness/deadliness of any novel would probably have to be done in animals in secret, providing limited information about its effectiveness as an agent against humans.
Depending on the threat level they were trying to achieve, it might be simpler to switch to a different virus that didn’t already have a robust vaccine-making infrastructure against it, or to a bacterial agent against which vaccines are far less prevalent and antibiotic development is still very slow.
So I agree that my original statement was too sweeping. But I also think that addressing this point at all requires quite a bit of specific context on the nature of the adversaries, and the level of defensive and offensive technologies and infrastructures.
Thanks for clarifying what you mean by “program.”
When we look at the Soviet BW program, they engaged in both “switching” (i.e. stockpiling lots of different agents) and “escalating,” (developing agents that were heat, cold, and antibiotics-resistant).
If the Soviets discovered that Americans had developed a new antibiotic against one of the bacterial agents in their stockpile, I agree that it would have been simpler to acquire that antibiotic and use it to select for a resistant strain in a dish. Antibiotics were hard to develop then, and remain difficult today.
Let’s say we’re in 2032 and a Soviet-style BW program was thinking about making a vaccine-resistant strain of Covid-19. This would have to be done with the fact in mind that their adversaries could rapidly make, manufacture, and update existing mRNA vaccines, and also had a portfolio of other vaccines against it. Any testing for the effectiveness of a vaccine and the infectiousness/deadliness of any novel would probably have to be done in animals in secret, providing limited information about its effectiveness as an agent against humans.
Depending on the threat level they were trying to achieve, it might be simpler to switch to a different virus that didn’t already have a robust vaccine-making infrastructure against it, or to a bacterial agent against which vaccines are far less prevalent and antibiotic development is still very slow.
So I agree that my original statement was too sweeping. But I also think that addressing this point at all requires quite a bit of specific context on the nature of the adversaries, and the level of defensive and offensive technologies and infrastructures.