I think that hypothesis is <<1% likely because very few people care about doing good strongly enough to entertain act utilitarian master plans of this sort, and the ones who do and are action-oriented enough to maybe pull it off hopefully realize it’s a bad idea have a morality that allows this. I mean if you put resources into this specific plan, why not work on a universal coronavirus vaccine or some other more robustly beneficial thing that won’t get you and your collaborators life in jail if found out.
- Evolution from the original Wuhan strain seems less likely to generate cross immunity than taking newer strains. If someone were shooting for cross immunity, wouldn’t they use newer strains? (Assuming that you can still make them less harmful if you select for that.)
- Omicron doesn’t actually give enough cross immunity at all, and presumably that sort of thing would have been easily testable. If someone wanted to do this on purpose, they’d be complete idiots because they essentially released a second pandemic (Delta and Omicron may well co-exist, especially in countries that don’t have a lot of vaccines that will get rid of Delta quickly).
Edit: Ah, you talk about cross immunity to older variants. Maybe your theory is that the project would have happened before Delta and somehow it took longer to spread after initial release? I mean, that’s probably coherent to imagine but seems way more likely some people were messing around with rodents for more narrow (but misguided) reasons.
I think that hypothesis is <<1% likely because very few people care about doing good strongly enough to entertain act utilitarian master plans of this sort, and the ones who do and are action-oriented enough to maybe pull it off hopefully realize it’s a bad idea have a morality that allows this. I mean if you put resources into this specific plan, why not work on a universal coronavirus vaccine or some other more robustly beneficial thing that won’t get you and your collaborators life in jail if found out.
Also some details wouldn’t add up:
- Evolution from the original Wuhan strain seems less likely to generate cross immunity than taking newer strains. If someone were shooting for cross immunity, wouldn’t they use newer strains? (Assuming that you can still make them less harmful if you select for that.)
- Omicron doesn’t actually give enough cross immunity at all, and presumably that sort of thing would have been easily testable. If someone wanted to do this on purpose, they’d be complete idiots because they essentially released a second pandemic (Delta and Omicron may well co-exist, especially in countries that don’t have a lot of vaccines that will get rid of Delta quickly).
Edit: Ah, you talk about cross immunity to older variants. Maybe your theory is that the project would have happened before Delta and somehow it took longer to spread after initial release? I mean, that’s probably coherent to imagine but seems way more likely some people were messing around with rodents for more narrow (but misguided) reasons.
To expand on this: https://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/unilateralist.pdf