Evolution cannot optimize for maximum harm. Natural viruses only evolved to reproduce, with the harm just a side effect. Humans can combine features of multiple natural viruses. There's no obvious reason why we couldn't make something with both the infectivity of measles and the lethality of rabies, as well as resistance to all known antivirals. If something like that gets out it's probably civilization ending.

Because it massively raises the amount of damage that a lone-wolf crazy person can do.

What if the white supremacists make a retro virus, that for instance only kills people with sickle cell anemia..

Not to mention causing a famine or lack of medicine by sabotaging the cold chain.

Are you actually asking this? Like why should people be worried that a disgruntled highly motivated person would venture into this area? Because it can happen. The outcomes of it could be really bad? It also doesn't have to be done by an individual, could be nation state or organization led. There are groups of people who believe humanity needs to end and all sorts of crazy stuff. Some of them have gone on mass murder suicide missions.

2 bad things can be threats at the same time. Even 10,000 things can be.

That seems a bit silly thinking they are not doing anything to protect the water supplies, and even more silly to not compare the impact of the things you are comparing. Poison a water supply and you hit how many, a city, a small part of a city? Now compare it to the impact of a virus like corona - we literally just went through that..

Lack of true biology training and lots of doomer scifi reading.

Coronavirus++ is not something that I would want on my calendar

Disrupting electric supply, water supply, and food supply chains are already tried and tested separately, with some limited monetary system disturbances, here and there. So doing those simultaneously - possibly leveraging on latent vulnerabilities kept covered for later abuse - sounds a natural step 'forward', close to trivial for those into that. Causing huge broad disturbances and possible unrest in societies. So that some governments started to ask people to build up reserves.

I can imagine that terrorist are sad now that they cannot use their preferred advanced bioengineering skills acquired through great efforts posing as scientist towards the so far unsuspecting services providing them with harmful DNA building blocks and now have to turn to much much more pedestrian methods instead of the heightened sophistication they crave.

Or to sources from other countries.

Its hard to imagine a mustache twirling terrorist bent on putting PFAS and lead in the american water supply, putting mad cow in the beef supply and making everything cost more because he would have been outcompeted by the US government.

Your status as a "defender" is measured by the fanciness of the threats you defend against, not their actual magnitude. That's why Space Force is so popular, and everyone working on vaccines is miserable.

Also, see the "lab leak" discourse. To me the question seemed irrelevant because the countermeasures would be exactly the same, but that's not how other people think; they're not interested in a mask mandate against a naturally occuring virus, but if they can tie the exact same genetically identical virus to a human enemy? The social status of the threat goes up!

Regular old measles? Not sexy. But a convenient vector for the internal threat. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/08/americas-measles-ep...

Made-up AI-assisted super-measles? Doesn't exist yet. But it's a great super sexy threat to defend against. You just have to ignore the kids dying of boring old regular naturally occuring measles in the meantime.