• Codex@lemmy.world
    261·
    11 months ago

    I’m not sure what the joke is? Weaponizing diseases is a real, actual job that people do.

    • 1995ToyotaCorolla@lemmy.worldEnglish
      29·
      11 months ago

      While that definitely is a real job, by far the more common job you’d have at an “infectious disease lab” would be at a hospital or some facility where you’re trying to treat them, rather than pump them out like AK-47’s

      This looks like a dating app screenshot, so the fact that a potential date completely skipped over “maybe this person works at a hospital” and landed on the conclusion that “this guy is the lord of war but for diseases” is worthy of a chuckle

        • XIIIesq@lemmy.world
          182·
          11 months ago

          If COVID was intended as a weapon then it was a really shit one.

          A good bio weapon would take out men of fighting age quickly and then become inert soon enough that you could move your troops in.

          Where as COVID was mostly a risk to the extremely elderly, obese or otherwise infirm and so contagious that it gets back to infect your own people in a matter of days.

          • shinratdr@lemmy.ca
            74·
            11 months ago

            Not to play conspiracy theorist advocate, but if you were developing viruses you probably wouldn’t make one big super contagious deadly virus, out of fear of exactly this happening.

            You’d probably develop one very deadly one that is hard to transmit and one more minor one that is very transmissible, and work on growing those capabilities separately with separate teams. Then if you actually needed to use them for something, you’d work on combining them.

            Obviously this a gross oversimplification, but the idea of “store and manage potentially life threatening things separately and only combine them when you absolutely have to” applies to all areas of defense and potentially hazardous research, so I have to imagine it would apply here too.