Maybe I’m too cynical, but that’s what I got from it. The video way overstates the ease of DIY viral research and understates how tightly regulated it already is.
reminder
The hard part of building a super-plague is not information it’s materials. It’s trivially easy to get the lengths of DNA you need to design something and obfuscate it enough that nobody would even know. The hard part is testing it and making sure it does what you want in various conditions.
“Only irresponsible governments and it’s cooperative backers should be able to fuck around with infectious diseases. We should keep all that tech in their hands so nobody else will be able to create countermeasures because we’ve monopolized all research into the matter.”
Plague-level biological warfare has only been conducted by state entities, and despite several terrorist states possessing immense nuclear arsenals, there has not been a super war. There is no reason to believe DIY biologists are going to engineer a superplague in their kitchen laboratories. This is clearly a bullshit justification to further centralize power in the hands of pharmaceutical companies and terrorist organizations such as the US government.
We must ensure that world wide plagues can only come from one place - Fort Detrick.
