A synthetic pandemic could be far, far worse than Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the fragility of the U.S.’s public health preparedness infrastructure when faced with a moderately deadly and moderately transmissible respiratory pathogen. We cannot begin to imagine the devastation — possibly even a threat to civilization — if the country had to face a synthetic pandemic from a virus that had been intentionally engineered to spread as effectively as measles and had the virulence of filoviruses such as Ebola or Marburg.