Bioweapon fears are overstated – technological hurdles, natural barriers, fear of retaliation, and more reliable weapons all disincentivize use and production

(Ruby Prosser, citing Jeff Ryan, lecturer in bioterrorism response and homeland security at Jacksonville State University, “Bioterrorism: how afraid should we really be?” The Medical Republic, August 17, ,)

However, Professor Ryan doubts that an individual or group is seriously working on that right now. This is because of how difficult it is to produce a large-scale viable bacterial or viral concoction that would be expertly disseminated, maintain its viability through the dissemination process, and manage to infect hundreds, if not thousands of people. “I think a lot of that is science fiction, rather than science fact. It takes a considerable amount of technology and resources and skills to be able to pull off something like that,” he says. Even the Rajneeshees, with all of their resources and a medical lab, weren’t able to pull off a particularly damaging attack. While it is possible for small-scale actors to launch a terrorist attack with something such as ricin or E. coli, Professor Ryan believes they would be better served using explosives or industrial chemicals that are readily available and don’t require such careful production. “I tend to think of the threat as a low-probability, high-consequence event,” he said. “It’s not likely to happen, but if it did, wow, it could be devastating.” For Professor Ryan, the technology needed to successfully pull off a major attack would require state actors. But this, he thinks, makes it unlikely in its own way. “A state-sponsored attack may be highly risky because of how the developed world would counter such an attack,” he says. “If somebody was to use biological weapons against the United States, and it was tracked to a state sponsored program or it was a direct act of war, we might retaliate with nukes.” That’s because while the US and other countries have given up their biological and chemical weapon stockpiles, they have made it clear that nuclear weapons may still be kept as a deterrent. There are also so many technological hurdles that a large, state-sponsored program and a small, rogue one alike would have to overcome. The reality of developing a sophisticated bioweapons program means that the creators will want to test their pathogens in nature to see how they survive and how they spread in the sun or wind, for example. “The reason why the plague, Yersinia pestis, was never really a good biological weapon is because it readily degrades in UV light,” Professor Ryan says. “Once the sun comes out, it starts to immediately degrade what you’ve deposited.” And while there have been spills from research centres that were detected, there is little evidence of new and interesting pathogens being found by surveillance systems, says Dr Martin Boland, a specialist in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons. Alarm bells would ring if we found something that looked like Ebola turning up in Afghanistan, or something like SARS in Nigeria, Dr Boland says. Moreover, biological weapons are simply less reliable and more prone to blow back against your own citizens or soldiers compared with traditional explosives, even chemical and nuclear weapons. Any plan for Chinese military leaders to unleash SARS-CoV-2 on the world, as conspiracy theorists have suggested occurred, would have been simply too prone to failure, he says. There was no way for those military commanders to be certain that the US would so severely mismanage their response to the pandemic – in other circumstances, swifter action and more scientifically informed responses could have averted much of the destruction. “On a strategic or tactical level, using a biological weapon is so fraught with problems that no moderately sane military or political commander would use it,” Dr Boland adds.