Engineered pathogens are inevitable and greatly increase the risk

Despite biomedical advances, nations remain profoundly vulnerable to pandemics. Even if every SARS-CoV-2 vaccine and therapeutic known at the time of writing had already been developed and approved at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world would still have suffered millions of casualties due to the logistical challenges of manufacturing and distribution. As of 2023, no nation can plausibly keep a highly lethal and transmissible pandemic from bringing down society by threatening to infect the essential workers responsible for distributing food, water, power and law enforcement.

Our analysis suggests that while civilisation-threatening Wildfire and Stealth pandemics are extremely unlikely to emerge from nature, accidental or deliberate release is disturbingly likely as a result of their development by a biological weapons programme or the dissemination of credible genomic blueprints by well-meaning scientists. Neither possibility can be ruled out. The Soviet Union attempted to weaponise smallpox even though the virus would also have devastated its own population. And as the physicist Richard Feynman famously remarked, “What I cannot create, I do not understand”.70 Given that researchers aim to understand and program biology, the life sciences community typically shares all its results through publication,71 the relevant harmful traits exist in natural pathogens, and artificial intelligence is widely expected to accelerate the rate of discovery, it would be surprising if humankind did not learn to build Wildfire and Stealth agents.