It. Is. Not. That. Easy. To. Spread.
There are many more weaponize-able bio-agents than Ebola. Many more. Furthermore, it can be contained.
You wanna use a bio-agent to destroy large swaths of the population? This ain’t it.
This aint it.
It all depends on the meaning of IS IS.
It’s the terror dude, it would appeal to them
and they get to be a martyr either way too.
I believe the key goal is to spread mental terror not necessarily physical damage.
Spraying people with blood is almost guaranteed to infect them.
But there are many better ways. How many of those are available to the terrorists.
You don’t have to effect large swaths. you infect people and let nature take its course. Two it is readily available cheap to put into use. No expensive bio-weapons labs needed. Just collect the dead in the streets.
These people think outside the box, they have to they don’t have billion dollar military budgets.
Think of 9/11 how much do you think the same mission planned and executed by most modern military organizations would have cost when compared to what it cost Osama bin Laden’s gang?
i disagree ... yes, there are better ways for NBC attacks ... but ebola will do just fine, in a pinch ...
No. You just instill fear in large swaths of the population, and they will destroy themselves.
It seems to be doing a bang up job of it in west Africa.
How stable do you think the economy will be if someone sets off a couple of vest bombs here, and say also in some packed with poor metropolis like in Mexico City. They put one there and in a couple weeks there would be 10 million people all at once trying to get into evil old ‘Merica for it’s health care...
Aren’t you missing the point?
First off, it IS pretty easy to spread if you intend to do so. You are confusing the mode of infection (requiring the virus to make it through the body’s natural barriers) which can be fairly easily avoided with proper facilities and protocols in a medical setting, with the extreme difficulty of avoiding infection from someone infected and intent on infecting unsuspecting others. Big difference.
And yes, ebola isn’t particularly suitable for traditional weaponizing. So what?
No one is even thinking along those lines. The prospect here discussed is using actual infected individuals as intentional disease vectors. I think it reasonable that someone with the intent and thought out plans could easily infect dozens if not hundreds of other over a week or so before symptoms become overt.
Now say you have 100 to 200 volunteer living vectors. It is easy for me to imagine 20,000 direct victims and thousands more secondary infections.
The real intent, though would not be to kill millions, as would be the case with respect to traditional biological warfare, but to instill panic and social paralysis.
It could be very effective.
Small pox. That’s the ticket. Or some genetic mutation of H5N1.
A few hundred cases would swamp our healthcare system. That is all you would need to accomplish.....
All you can eat buffets and a small perfume bottle with a blood/water mix that is spritzed on the food while no one is looking.
That would make 9/11 look like a walk in the park in comparison of terror attacks, and the guy doing the bleeding can be in a shack somewhere dead while a healthy accomplice spends a couple of WEEKS doing this up and down the east or west coast in every place he can find.
Imagine him/her in Vegas at all the casino buffets day after day until he finally succumbs to the infection and he then dons the vest and takes himself out the easy way.
A few thousand bucks and America can be brought to her knees.
It is not about destroying “large swaths of the population”, it’s about terrorizing them. I can’t think of much that these demented sickos could do short of a nuclear attack that would have a deeper psychological effect than that. A couple episodes of that and this country would be at a stand still.