Why bioweapons are impossible to avoid

Vaccines are our best defence against infectious disease, saving millions of lives each year. We desperately need better therapies, faster. But that does not make them a panacea, especially against weaponised pathogens. And weaponised pathogens are not hypothetical. The Soviet Union, for instance, ran a top-secret bioweapons programme for decades. Tens of thousands of researchers sought to enhance many different pathogens. They even developed a weaponised strain of the smallpox virus, accepting the likelihood that…