Bioterror DA

Uniqueness
Currently the US government has not allowed for scientists to
release details on the creation of deadly diseases
Cohen 11
[Adam Cohen, Journalist and Lawyer, TIME, Should Medical Journals Print Info That Could Help Bioterrorists?,
http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/27/should-medical-journals-print-info-that-could-help-bioterrorists/, 2011]

Bird flu is deadly, but it generally does not spread easily from human to human. Now, scientists in Wisconsin and the

Netherlands have created a strain of bird flu that can spread through the air a virus that
could kill millions if terrorists managed to create a batch and weaponize it. This raises a thorny question: Should medical
journals be allowed to print the details of how the virus is made? A government advisory board has urged two
scientific journals to omit some of the specifics about the virus the first time it has issued such a
request. Supporters insist that the boards request is a much-needed precaution that could save millions of lives. But critics say that

the government is engaging in censorship and interfering with academic freedom. (PHOTOS: Bird Flu Outbreak of 2008) It is a

classic clash of liberty versus security. The question is such a difficult one because whichever course the government takes carries

risks and costs. Which option blocking publication or allowing it is the lesser of two evils? It is not hard to see
why the government is seeking to keep details of the virus out of print. The H5N1 bird-flu
virus rarely infects humans. But when it does cross the species barrier, the mortality rate can be as high as 60%. If terrorists were

able to use the new research to make a contagious strain of the virus, the result could be a real-world version of the movie

Contagion. That is: worldwide panic and mass deaths. The government is trying to avoid this by urging
scientific journals to describe the virus only in general terms and keep out the sort of
details that could be used to replicate it. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, which was
created after the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001, asked the journals Science and Nature to be selective when they published articles

on the highly contagious strain of H5N1.

 Link
Prioritizing civil liberties over national security, especially
when they are in conflict, will allow medical journals to publish
details that would help bioterrorists replicate the diseases.
 Impact

Terrorists will use bioweapons- guarantees extinction

Cooper 13
(Joshua, 1/23/13, University of South Carolina, Bioterrorism and the Fermi Paradox,
http://people.math.sc.edu/cooper/fermi.pdf, 7/15/15, SM)

We may conclude that, when a civilization reaches its space-faring age, it will more or less at the same moment (1)
contain many individuals who seek to cause large-scale destruction, and (2) acquire the capacity to tinker with its
own genetic chemistry. This is a perfect recipe for bioterrorism, and, given the many very natural pathways for its
development and the overwhelming evidence that precisely this course has been taken by humanity, it is hard to
see how bioterrorism does not provide a neat, if profoundly unsettling, solution to Fermis paradox. One might
if omnicidal individuals are successful in releasing highly virulent and
object that,
deadly genetic malware into the wild, they are still unlikely to succeed in killing everyone. However,
even if every such mass death event results only in a high (i.e., not total) kill rate and there is a large gap
between each such event (so that individuals can build up the requisite scientific infrastructure again),
extinction would be inevitable regardless. Some of the engineered bioweapons will be more
post-apocalyptic
successful than others; the inter-apocalyptic eras will vary in length; and
environments may be so war-torn, disease-stricken, and impoverished of genetic variation
that they may culminate in true extinction events even if the initial
cataclysm only results in 90% death rates, since they may cause the
effective population size to dip below the so-called minimum viable
population. This author ran a Monte Carlo simulation using as (admittedly very crude and poorly informed,
though arguably conservative) estimates the following Earth-like parameters: bioterrorism event mean death rate
50% and standard deviation 25% (beta distribution), initial population 1010, minimum viable population 4000,
individual omnicidal act probability 107 per annum, and population growth rate 2% per annum. One thousand
trials yielded an average post-space-age time until extinction of less than 8000 years. This is essentially
instantaneous on a cosmological scale, and varying the parameters by quite a bit does nothing to make the
survival period comparable with the age of the universe.