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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1662 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 23, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Covid would have been an insane design for a bioweapon, for the same reason a nuclear hand grenade would be a horrible thing to issue to infantry. Weapons are supposed to incapacitate the enemy while not harming the user, or at least not risking the user nearly as much. Airborne high-R0 pathogens don't work as bioweapons unless you've got a (nearly) sterilizing vaccine ready before release, not a 90%-effective vaccine ready more than a year later. The ~0.5% case fatality rate and the exponentially disproportionate harm to older people are also pretty lousy weapon design. I guess this might have been version 0.0.1, with flaws they hoped to fix after many more years of development?

they didn't know which version had escaped

This might be true, though, not because they were trying to run a bioweapon lab, but because sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has BSL-4 space, but also BSL-3 and BSL-2, and was doing coronavirus gain-of-function (wait, apologies to Fauci, I of course merely mean aingay-of-unctionfay) research in the latter. Even if Covid-19 was a natural zoonotic disease, the first attempt to investigate it would have revealed that a leak of something was a possibility, and the options at that point would be "assume it might be something nasty" or "assume that everybody who might have accidentally released something nasty has been utterly forthright about their potentially-huge mistakes", the latter of which would ironically itself have been a potentially-huge mistake.

You're assuming COVID in this scenario was the intended bioweapon and not an intermediate they were e.g. gene-harvesting.

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