Weaponization means development of a means of infecting people by means other than naturally occurring processes. Injecting of Ebola virus into suicide volunteer Charlie Jihadi who then boards the MTA and transmits the virus by standing close to them is not weaponization, even if Charlie caught it from the injection:
Did he ever return?
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn'd
He may ride forever'neath the streets of Boston
He's the man who never returned!
Weaponization of the anthrax used on us after 9/11 took an enormous amount of work in making the spores tiny enough to be "floaty" without clumping, and stable enough for long-term storage. IMO it was the product of an unsuccessful military weaponization program, which cost way too much to be produced in militarily useful quantities. What was used on us was probably a substantial proportion, perhaps most, of the experimental program's production.
Terrorists just don't have the resources (yet) to modify the current Zaire strain of Ebola causing the West African epidemic so it won't be susceptible to vaccines. Weaponization for them means figuring out how to grow sufficient quantities of Ebola for terrorist use, and distribute it to victims/create dangerous amounts of fomites, without killing themselves first.
This will of course change as biotech becomes accessible for terrorist use, but Ebola vaccines will be necessary as well as useful for years. Their use will also reduce public panic, and I expect that will be a big factor in government decisions to make Ebola vaccinations mandatory.
Plus there are outright cures (medications as treatment) being developed which will be more useful in the long run.
"... and transmits the virus to new victims by standing close to them is not weaponization ..."
There are medicines right now.
Japan has offered 20K patients worth of Favipiravir to WHO for use in West Africa. So far? Crickets from WHO.
It stopped ebola in lab animals after symptoms appeared.
They offered it a month ago. If it’s found to be effective there should be some WHO bureaucrats decorating lamp posts when this is all over.
There is no money, however, in a lot of research into medications for viruses. Medications aren’t indemnified, vaccines are. Medications expire from patent, vaccines do not. Medications aren’t mandated, vaccines are.
There is simply not the ‘carrot’ there for pharma to develop antiviral medications.
Vaccine tech on the other hand is hoppin’.
The issue with weaponization (and these kits can be had for a few thousands of dollars now and if you haven’t been in grad school in the sciences in the US you’ll be delighted to know that most of the grad students are either Chinese or Middle Eastern) is ease of availability of the equipment to manipulate genes. It’s not *quite* walmart scaled yet, but it’s close.
20 years ago I’d agree that the terrorists didn’t have the ability or training to manipulate a viral genome for evil. I don’t agree with that statement now. At all.
Saddam had a bioweapons research facility or two. Those staff and techs went somewhere...
And in the case of ebola, nature is doing that pretty efficiently on her own. This particular strain is only 97% identical to the one in 1976. That 3% is the difference between humans and chimps. The vaccine we develop against this outbreak may well be useless against the next one in 5 years.
And does nothing to protect against any of the other strains of ebola. Or many other hemorrhagic fevers. Or any of the rna viruses in general.
This is a case of where we have a hammer so every problem looks like a nail.
And the cost to just vaccinate Africa’s 1B people would be $50B for a $50 vaccine. It’s more like several hundred dollars for new vaccines now.
And that’s just for one strains of one hemorrhagic fever.
We’ll run out of money long before we run out of jungle diseases to vaccinate against.
This is another scary family of jungle viruses.
This one is trying to find humans to run through in Australia right now. Let’s hope the Australian authorities are on the ball with this...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henipavirus
‘Contagion’ the movie was based on this family of viruses.