I am not sure you are giving governments enough credit. Wrt things like gene drive safety, certain agencies are already working on these things. I know some researchers who just got a grant to work on how to contain and manage gene drives. US military research also includes plenty of stuff on bioterrorism—both agricultural and through pathogens. Grantmaking efforts are relatively rapid ways to get this stuff done, I think?
X-risk is so broad and cuts across so many different fields that dedicating an entire agency to it seems difficult, especially if you consider effectiveness.
I think, in this type of analysis, for an infectious disease, it’s really important to look at potential for spread as well.
Malaria is region-constricted (only places with the right mosquitoes), whereas HIV is not. Therefore, there’s a natural cap at the amount of malaria we can have if malaria control ceased to exist, whereas HIV’s ‘natural cap’ is potentially “all susceptible humans”.
If you include “all future infections” into the analysis, how much suffering due to HIV can be avoided due to current efforts to control HIV? I mean, you can sort of see this in a natural experiment created by South Africa’s HIV denialism − 18.5% of the population there is infected, compared to 6% of Kenya and 3% of Nigeria, despite both Kenya and Nigeria having lower GDP/capita than South Africa. There’s an article on the costs of HIV denialism in SA here. Obviously, societal dynamics are different in SA than other places, but 3x the amount of HIV is a pretty significant number.
Anyway, the CBAs on interventions like promoting condom use, testing services, education campaigns, and such are (obviously) difficult to do, but that… really doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be funding them.
As for agony of HIV over malaria—are you sure? Does this include the ‘psychic’ cost of HIV (mental stress, stigma, constrained social mobility, shunning from society/friends/family) along with the physical cost?