Urgent Needs To Prepare For Manmade Virus Attacks, Says US Government Report (theguardian.com)

A major U.S. government report warns that advances in synthetic biology now allow scientists to have the capability to recreate dangerous viruses from scratch; make harmful bacteria more deadly; and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body. The Guardian reports: In the report, the scientists describe how synthetic biology, which gives researchers precision tools to manipulate living organisms, "enhances and expands" opportunities to create bioweapons. "As the power of the technology increases, that brings a general need to scrutinize where harms could come from," said Peter Carr, a senior scientist at MIT's Synthetic Biology Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The report calls on the U.S. government to rethink how it conducts disease surveillance, so it can better detect novel bioweapons, and to look at ways to bolster defenses, for example by finding ways to make and deploy vaccines far more rapidly. For every bioweapon the scientists consider, the report sets out key hurdles that, once cleared, will make the weapons more feasible. The Guardian references a case 20 years ago where geneticist Eckard Wimmer recreated the poliovirus in a test tube. Earlier this year, a team at the University of Alberta built an infectious horse pox virus. "The virus is a close relative of smallpox, which may have claimed half a billion lives in the 20th century," reports The Guardian. "Today, the genetic code of almost any mammalian virus can be found online and synthesized."

Comments

Limitations of deadly viruses / deadly bacteria

[DrYak]

and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body

In the specific case of viruses, it's counter productive. As some hyper dangerous viruses have shown like Ebola, it you kill your host, you won't have a host into which to reproduce anymore.
Viruses aren't full autonomous life forms, their just simple genetic code (recipes that need an actual host's cell with cellular machinery to interpret the code and produce more viruses).
The "evolutionary target" that most viruses aspire to become (i.e.: the fittest mutant that are selected by natural selection) isn't ebola, it's the common cold : a virus that is relatively benign and doesn't harm the host too much, so it can safely keep replicating in a still-alive host, and can have the time to find other alive hosts to which to transmit (while leaving as much alive hosts as possible for a potential future new round of infection by a new variant)

If some mad scientist create some lab monster that produces lots of lethal toxins, that synthetic virus is at a high risk of killing the host without having had any chance to spread.

With bacteria, the problem is similar but in reverse : bacteria are autonomous life forms - cells that multiply on their own. They basically don't need us (beyond a few disease-inducing bacteria that rely on bodies for environment (relative warmth) and food).
Whatever weird dangerous gene the mad scientist sticks into them, that poison isn't necessary to achieve what it basically wants (to multiply).
So, unless these poison-producing genes are somewhat linked to some critical biochemistry needed by the bacteria, there will be no evolutionary pressure to keep producing the poison (quite the opposite : due to the way they replicate their genome (=single origin) bacteria tend to lose useless gene. Less bullshit genes = less times spent in replicating that bullshit)

(also, if the bacteria needs some environment for potential victim (say, again warmth) the same logic as with virus applies (a dead host won't be producing any warmth anymore).
The first infected victim with a synthetic bug will die, but over lots of generation, the bacteria will eventually lose the poison-producing gene because it will be able to replicate faster (and thus over take the slower replicating bacteria that have more bullshit gene) (*).

So yeah, a few mad scientist could try to CRIPR their way in clandestine lab to build super-bugs with ultra-killing genes, but if these monsters kill too fast, they won't stand a long term chance.
It will suck for the first few patients who get sick, but the bugs will have a hard time taking over the world.

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(*) - conversely, that's why antibiotic resistance started to become "a thing" only recently when antibiotics started to get used on large scale (by the agricultural industry, by over prescription, etc.). Before that large scale antibiotics use, there's any pressure to justifiy the bacteria keeping the extra genetic material coding for the resistance (e.g.: the plasmid carrying beta-lactamases).

chimera viruses

[DrYak]

various new diseases that our immune systems don't know how to handle.

By definition our immune systems doesn't know how to handle disease (be it new or not) with a few exceptions,
because our immune systems relies on adaptive immunity (with a few exceptions where the innate immunity can wipe a couple of pathogens).

Our body have evolved not to handle only *known* pathogen (which would have been a pretty stupid strategy : such animal would be only 1 mutation away by a known pathogen to evade the innate immunity and wipe out the innate-only animal. Such animal would have been unfit and would have gone extinct if they ever hapenned to exist).

Our body have evolved to be able to handle any unknown pathogen as long as they can survive long enough for the adaptive immunity to kick in, actually adapt and come up with a solution to wipe out the attacker.
Works pretty well most of the time (most of the time, you don't even get sick, a few of the time you get sick but manage to fight off the infection. Only a few pathogen that have evolved ways to fuck up the adaptive immunity - e.g.: HIV fucks up the lymphocyte - or hide away -e.g.: rabbies achieves evasion by burrowing into the hard-to-access nervous system)

And vaccination is basically just giving a "practice target" to the adaptive system to practice its adaptivity against and come up with an efficien wiping-out solution, before an actual occurrence of a disease.
Its leveraging the same natural adaptive process that your body does every day against any upcoming as of yet unknown disease it encounters (and on some bad days, while already having caught and being sick from said just-yer-encountered disease).
Your white blood cells are literally encountering crazy amount of new compounds every days and inventing new anti-bodies against them. Vaccination is just adding yet another compound on the list, because one day, you might encounter a pathogen with said compound on its surface that could make you sick.

the semi mad ones have been doing it since the 1930s by using mouse brains and other animal tissues to grow or weaken the viruses used in vaccines. And in the process, transferring animal viruses into the human population causing various new diseases

There is very little scientific research showing actual problems caused by vaccination. (e.g.: the "autism caused by vaccine" paper was retracted due to being actually bullshit).
There is huge amount of litterature showing the actual benefits of vaccination (you can spend days hunting for meta-analysis about vaccinations on search engines like PubMed).

I'm not aware of serious peer-reviewed scientific article showing that vaccine are a vector of animal viruses jumping to human hosts (again, please concentrate on serious scientific journal, that will anounce retraction if an article turns out to be bonker. Not click-baity random websites).

The documented jump-over-species barrier are usually caused by combination of environmental exposure (e.g.: people working knee-deep in animal excrement) and by chimerisation due to co-infection (e.g.: a pig on a farm with dubious hygiene managing to get infected both by some bird-exclusive influenza and a human-compatile influenza. There's quite some research into this. Again rely on scientific publication from reputable sources.)

So at that point you have to admit that the "cancers are caused by all the weird mouse-brain-vaccine-hybrids" doesn't sound a very compelling theory.
Or that absolutely the whole planet is in a conspiration to hide the fact from you personally.

Vaccines are safe, they are among the most well studied modern medicine.