H5N1 (2013)
&gt; For whatever reason, we seem to be wired to overweight the risk of the dramatic, scary, but very unlikely and underweight the risk of the mundane, familiar, and probable.<p>Two things.  One, we do not sufficiently emphasize pandemics&#x2F;epidemics -- this is partly because these things have been fairly rare and rarely very bad, and we have a way of focusing on what we&#x27;re able to be aware of.  As a result we get very upset when rare, very noticeable events happen, but we don&#x27;t take notice of the risk of their happening when... they&#x27;re not happening.<p>Second, we do very much care about <i>intent</i>.  Nobody doubts that if Al-Qaeda had been able to steal and use nuclear weapons, they would have -- their intent was evil, and that meant they needed to be taken care of.  As long terrorists can only kill a few, we can ignore them, but given their intent is to kill many, we can&#x27;t ignore them entirely.  Regarding car crashes and other accidents, the rates of fatalities per-mile traveled and such have been going down, and can be expected to go down further as technology progresses -- and we do invest in improving technology to make our roads and cars safer.<p>Fatalities from terrorism and fatalities from traffic accidents are simply not comparable -- they&#x27;re apples and oranges.  Accident fatalities won&#x27;t spike, but terrorism fatalities are liable to spike intolerably at any moment.  The difference is intent: no one intends to make traffic accidents occur, but there are people who intend to kill many other people.  Perhaps in the long run both obey statistical distributions, just different ones, but for the human psyche, intent counts.<p>Perhaps we shouldn&#x27;t care about intent.  Or perhaps we should focus on limiting the capabilities of those with evil intent -- but this is not much different than saying we must continue to put effort into hunting terrorists.<p>Anyone making the traffic accident vs. terrorism comparison needs to acknowledge the intent distinction if they are to be taken seriously.  They almost never do though.<p>&gt; Also in 2011, some researchers figured out how to reengineer H5N1—avian influenza virus—to make it much scarier by causing five mutations at the same time that all together made the virus both easy to spread and quite lethal. These five mutations could all occur in nature, but it’d be unlikely in the same copy of the virus. I have no doubt that the media overstated the danger, but it’s still worth thinking about.<p>Is it possible to overstate the danger of engineered pathogens?  All that&#x27;s needed for that to lead to catastrophe, besides engineering, is <i>intent</i>, or accidental release.  Naturally occurring pathogens are acts of god.  Engineered pathogens are not -- their use against populations certainly isn&#x27;t, even if resulting from lab accidents.<p>If an engineered pathogen could kill millions, and all that&#x27;s missing is intent, then engineered pathogens are as problematic as nuclear weapons.  More problematic than nuclear weapons, in fact, because the technology needed to engineer pathogens is harder to control, easier to come by &#x2F; develop, etc.  The only mitigation is the -admittedly massive- risk to the user of having the pathogen hit them too.<p>Pathogen engineering comes with a number of advantages to developing and using them, and just one disadvantage:<p>- adv.: cheap, difficult to control against proliferation
 - adv.: plausible deniability, allowing anonymous use
 - disadv.: can boomerang on the user<p>The disadvantage is the strongest reason to believe that covid-19 wasn&#x27;t both, engineered <i>and</i> released with intent.  And if it was, it has boomeranged.<p>That one disadvantage can be negated with time by also developing vaccines and treatments ahead of use.  But that wouldn&#x27;t work for a state actor, as that would erase plausible deniability and thus invite counter-attacks if used.  Fortunately, developing vaccines and treatments gets costly enough to put it beyond a terrorist group&#x27;s means, but then, a suicidal terrorist might use it anyways.<p>But even if bioweapons are unlikely to be used with intent, doesn&#x27;t mean that they aren&#x27;t worth worrying about.  Lab accidents are a possibility, thus something to worry about.<p>Going back to the first point above, there really are many threats to worry about, and we can&#x27;t all worry equally about all of them.  This is why we have a national security apparatus: so we can focus sufficient resources on each threat.  Even if the national security apparatus here, in the U.S., had done everything right as to pandemics, they would have to have been doing it for many years.<p>One thing we can count on is the national security apparatus taking pandemics much more seriously going forwards, though that will be at the risk of preparing to fight yesterday&#x27;s war, ignoring the risk that tomorrow&#x27;s threat may look much different.  If that happens, it will be because humans have a hard time planning against the unknown or the unlikely.<p>Before 9&#x2F;11 there were people who thought that passenger airplane attacks were a threat, but those were not taken seriously.  We see this over and over.  I wouldn&#x27;t bet on anyone being particularly readier for the next big problem than we were in this case, in the case of Katrina, in the case of 9&#x2F;11, in 1918, in 1941, etc.