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Apparently, a lab in china has created a virus with a 100% kill rate in humanized mice. Combined with the fact that there's a decent chance that COVID was a lab leak, this sort of thing is extremely dangerous to be doing.
I'm not sure how best to make it so that people are not incentivized to do things like this, but ceasing to fund this variety of research (it looks like the US ended one program that was pushing this sort of thing last year), and instating some sort of legal liability on those who do this, and especially if they dispose of it badly, probably seem like good decisions.
Extremely dangerous diseases are among the top few things in being both disastrous to humanity (unlike climate change) and also relatively likely (unlike a massive asteroid hitting earth). Development of them is also something that is not excessively difficult to do. This is probably the closest thing we have so far to Bostrom's black ball metaphor. People joke about Yudkowskian airstrikes on data centers; would airstrikes on labs be similarly warranted? More seriously, though, there should be far more effort put into preventing this sort of thing than there currently is.
Bostrom's concerns should probably be something more important to be aware of. The ideal is just to not develop technology in specific fields to the point that killing millions is a cheap and easy thing to do. Of course, the tradeoff is totalitarianism, a terror of its own.
EDIT: Some of the comments have argued, relatively convincingly, that this particular news story was overblown and misleading.
I've often felt engineered disease is underrated as a human apocalypse scenario. Largely, I think, because they didn't exist when nuclear mass annihilation first came into concept.
In WWII it seems, to my non-expert contrarian eye, that the "good guys" had started to descend into a philosophy where mass murdering "enemy" civilian populations to simply brute force attrite the rival society into nothing was taken to be valid. It's probably a good thing the war ended when it did. Since winners write the history books, and people like to justify "their side," everyone just kind of ignores this, or says it wasn't a big deal, or even tries to justify it. Also mostly fortunately, nuclear MAD means the taste of it has never since been realized again in a protracted war between two fully developed industrial powers where leaders would again descend into (mass) murderous impatience. But if that did happen I feel like it would be a countdown until some idiot sociopath in the top brass started suggesting that maybe a strategic disease could be controlled, and if it could then it would end the conflict with ease that no bomb could. Disease is such a more efficient killer than bombs, and cost effective too. The longer a protracted war goes, the more likely people will start listening to the idiot.
I don't think that's very likely for normal orthodox war these days because of old fashioned nuclear deterrence. But what about a civil war? Some gambler in an American civil war gets ahold of the disease library in Atlanta. The CPC loses legitimacy and China descends into power struggle chaos.
"Here me out: ethnically targeted diseases. Almost none of our armed forces are [enemy ethnic group]."
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