How so? We know that communicable diseases mutate all the time, even when they don't have a single human host, so destroying any samples that could provide a ba

How so? We know that communicable diseases mutate all the time, even when they don't have a single human host, so destroying any samples that could provide a baseline for any future pathogen is nothing short of morally reprehensible. Variola major is one of the deadliest diseases in human history, killing 20+% of those infected, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions in the 20th century alone. If these samples were destroyed and a mutated smallpox reappears globally, it would be an unmitigated public health disaster and we'd be crippled without being able to experimentally compare the new version to the old. Given the stakes and nature's contempt for geopolitics, it's an unavoidable tradeoff.