Why This Matters
This letter argues that biosecurity policy focused solely on preventing mass casualties from engineered pathogens misses a critical risk: biological threats that leave people alive but severely disabled, undermining a nation's functional capacity. It uses conditions like severe ME/CFS and post-COVID disability as real-world evidence that survival and functional security are not the same thing, urging policymakers to broaden their threat models accordingly.
Key Takeaways
- Biosecurity discussions often equate threat severity with death toll, but debilitating chronic illness can undermine national capacity without killing anyone.
- Severe/very severe ME/CFS and post-COVID disability are cited as real examples showing mass functional impairment is already possible from biological events.
- The author calls for biosecurity frameworks to explicitly account for functional security, not just survival, when assessing AI-enabled biological threats.
Your News feature on artificial-intelligence-enabled biological threats asks how the capability to design such threats should reshape biosecurity (see Nature 653, 344–347; 2026). Yet a biological event need not cause mass death to compromise the functional capacity of a nation. Severe and very severe ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) provide a natural warning. People with this condition are often housebound or bedbound, dependent on care and sometimes intolerant of sensory stimulation. COVID-19 also exposed post-infectious disability at population scale. These conditions are not models of attack; they show that there is difference between survival and functional security.
Nature 657, 1112 (2026)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02996-2
Competing Interests The author declares no competing interests.
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