Last week I attended the talk by GRF Ty about his work creating vaccines. I didn’t learn too much about specific vaccination techniques but I was very interested in a pathogen he mentioned, Francisella tularensis. This is a bacterium that, due to a variety of factors including the ability to be aerosolized, low dose needed to kill, and its very high virulence, is considered a prime target for bioweapons. Bioweapons are actually talked about surprisingly little today: I think more credence is given to nuclear and chemical weapons, so I thought I would try and look at the current state of precautions against them.

As an example, take anthrax. caused by Bacillus anthracis. Looking at CDC documentation on the current vaccination situation (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/anthrax/public/index.html) there is a vaccine available, but there is nowhere enough supply in the case of an attack. In addition, it can form endospores when necessary: small capsules that are resistant to most methods of destruction besides boiling. This makes it particularly easy to transport, as it was in envelopes during the 2001 attacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks).

Another example is smallpox. Smallpox is extremely virulent, and basically the only disease that as of 2018 we have completely eradicated in the wild. However, there is still samples of the virus in the US and Russia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_controversy) over which there’s still a controversy over whether to destroy the samples. If a bad actor got ahold of one of these samples, there would be little in their way since vaccines aren’t produced anymore. This could be further compounded by growing the strain until it mutated into something that was resistant against current vaccines.

There is also substantial historical precedence for such programs. In the 70’s the Soviet’s tested smallpox as a potential weapon: one accidental release over the Aral Sea caused a smallpox outbreak (citation: https://smile.amazon.com/Soviet-Biological-Weapons-Program-History/dp/0674047702). In addition, during the Rhodesian Bush War water supplies were deliberately contaminated with cholera (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodesian_Bush_War). Again, these kinds of weapons are particularly problematic because they can very easily be mutated in isolation to be immune to known techniques.