Early on one news site I followed kept a long list of all the vaccine candidates that were under development, and there were impressively many. Even the Kazakh

Early on one news site I followed kept a long list of all the vaccine candidates that were under development, and there were impressively many. Even the Kazakh Biosafety Research Institute had one. That kind of worried me. Because even if you think sars-cov-2 is completely natural (and I have no problem accepting that position), have you thought about how many groups around would still have the capacity to make such a virus, if they wanted to? Even just the fact that "some people believe the virus was made in a lab" can be dangerous. Because what if, say, Kazakhstan's dictator-emeritus Nursultan Nazarbayev believed it? How far-fetched is it that he, or someone like him even in the more nominally democratic parts of the world, would decide, "they fired the first shot, we can't allow there to be a bioweapon gap!" and commandeer the institute to do "dual use" research? It would be easy to excuse too. They could say, "we're just designing these powerful virus variants to have a vaccine ready in case someone else comes up with the same powerful virus variant", and it would be a reasonable argument, at least as arms race escalation arguments go.