The downside of biowarfare is pretty much like combat gas downside; if wind turns you get to taste your own medicine. To this day "we" mostly have "all or nothing" bioweapons, they aren't selective enough, your own pop is as vulnerable to it as the next one. Needless to mention that not only there are not enough vaccine doses for the whole pop, if any, but also that a virus can and will mutate so even if it was rather selective in the beginning for lack of better option, it's anything but guaranteed that it will remain that way. And of course, the R&D of such weapon is extremely dangerous politically and biologically speaking; if the word gets out the whole international community gets on your ass, and if the virus gets out accidentally you enter a world of shit. ... Now if you performed "gain of function" work on a benign virus like corona... And the shit gets out, well it's a benign flu virus on steroid, but still a lamer. The big advantage being that it is scary as fuck because those who don't know what that is, will freak out precisely because they don't know what that new thing is, and all they know is that where it comes from people are panicking, obviously, the gov shuts down everything and refuses to communicate transparently on it.... Something's fishy. There's no vaccine, and it spreads like wildfire... So this has all the characteristics of a nightmare scenario evidently from a .gov standpoint.... So what do you do? Whatever you do you necessarily over react for lack of better option, and it's only in hindsight that you can tell you overreacted... And that's too bad the entire economy got shut down, hysteria is all over the place, massive economic downturn you name it. And yeah, the entire .gov chain of command is caught off guard like everybody else, from there it's the domino effect And all that for a false positive in the end. But that, you can only know it in hindsight... Too late