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You'll be happy to know that I did in fact throw some fairly substantial amounts of money at jefftk and friends for their wastewater surveillance / sequencing / anomaly detection project. Significantly prompted by us having this conversation.
I'm genuinely heartened to hear that! I hope you don't mind if I use it as an excuse for a second-hand Effective Altruist card haha. (j/k, but presumably the ones doing admin or fundraising work get away with it).
To discuss my current stance on bioterrorism x-risk in slightly more detail, such monitoring will significantly hamper lone crazies/small groups the most. Of course, they have a hard time of it, at least in the West. Just about the hardest part of making a truly extinction-level threat of a pathogen is not dying to Alpha 0.3 halfway through the process. Look at all the issues even BSL-3+ labs have with leaks. Some degree of surveillance, even if hardly the most rigorous, has been implemented. I believe most reputable purveyors of on-demand DNA/RNA/protein synthesis are filtering for known pathogens/GOF/bioweapons, though I suspect it is hardly robust, or insurmountable to a determined adversary willing to get their hands dirty.
This doesn't solve the issue of more well-resourced actors, especially in jurisdictions with more laissez-faire policies, but nation-states are generally not omnicidal (citation hopefully not needed). Wastewater surveillance will, at the very least, tell us something is up, and might even be good enough to save civilization if a pathogen isn't ridiculously good.
I'm glad you made the donation, and I sincerely hope they manage to scale cheaply and ubiquitously enough that we get some hint of what's coming that's more robust than doctors near wet-markets wondering about a really weird flu.
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