That's an interesting hypothesis: The antivax/antimask/etc. movements as social media manipulation in preparation for a bioweapon.
What's interesting is the dynamic between the epi community and the security community. I'm not sure if I'm naming those correctly:
* The security community does a lot of threat modeling (how might we be attacked? how might we have been attacked?), which is helpful. That doesn't suggest they believe those things actually happened.
* The epi community views this as coded language for believing in bizarre conspiracy theories.
> The antivax/antimask/etc. movements as social media manipulation in preparation for a bioweapon
Not what I was saying, so apologies if that's how it reads. I'm saying very passive "bioweapons" could be used to cause stress, increase societal friction, disrupt normality, etc over extended periods of time... effectively destabilizing societies from within, causing governments to take their eyes off the ball, letting down their guard, etc...
What's interesting is that the government (forget which department and paper) did have a plan. They had accounted for this scenario. But I guess there's a chasm between having a plan and being able to put it into practice.
Different scientific communities use different scientific methods, and often come to vastly different conclusions as a result. Epi, and related communities, uses frequentist statistical methods. It's an interesting dynamic when two communities have research methods which fundamentally conflict.
What's interesting is the dynamic between the epi community and the security community. I'm not sure if I'm naming those correctly:
* The security community does a lot of threat modeling (how might we be attacked? how might we have been attacked?), which is helpful. That doesn't suggest they believe those things actually happened.
* The epi community views this as coded language for believing in bizarre conspiracy theories.