I’m not going to go into the full details on how one would do this, but using resources which an average undergraduate biology student has, it would be fairly trivial to culture up a strain of pretty much any BSL-2 pathogen (Mycobacterium tuberculosis is one example), which said undergrad would have easy access to, which is resistant to all antibiotics you throw at it (12 of them in the class I took this semester, which include vancomycin, tetracycline, and several other “last resort” antibiotics). Materials would be quite inexpensive, and incubators can be made cheaply from common household items.
In this case, you’re not selecting for transmissibility. You’re selecting for difficulty of treatment. Several other techniques accessible to undergrads could be used to make this cultured organism even more dangerous, but unlike the techniques discussed in the above paragraph above, they are sufficiently non-obvious that putting them on a public forum might actually give bad actors useful ideas.
The difficult part of engineering a targeted pandemic is not the “pandemic” part, it’s the “targeted” part.
I’m not going to go into the full details on how one would do this, but using resources which an average undergraduate biology student has, it would be fairly trivial to culture up a strain of pretty much any BSL-2 pathogen (Mycobacterium tuberculosis is one example), which said undergrad would have easy access to, which is resistant to all antibiotics you throw at it (12 of them in the class I took this semester, which include vancomycin, tetracycline, and several other “last resort” antibiotics). Materials would be quite inexpensive, and incubators can be made cheaply from common household items.
In this case, you’re not selecting for transmissibility. You’re selecting for difficulty of treatment. Several other techniques accessible to undergrads could be used to make this cultured organism even more dangerous, but unlike the techniques discussed in the above paragraph above, they are sufficiently non-obvious that putting them on a public forum might actually give bad actors useful ideas.
The difficult part of engineering a targeted pandemic is not the “pandemic” part, it’s the “targeted” part.