Now here’s a real risk involving measles that I sometimes worry about. What if the measles virus experienced a set of immune escape mutations where suddenly existing vaccines no longer work? If this happened the consequences would be horrifying. We’d have an immediate, world-wide measles epidemic long before we could develop and roll out a new vaccine. What’s the likelihood this will happen? Informed estimates are that it is low. But realistically speaking, even if the likelihood is low, it’s probably higher than the likelihood that a disgruntled teenager will design a supervirus with AI. So, something to think about.

I'm confused. Would a bit of gain-of-function exploration + measles virus genome = supervirus?

I'm no biologist, but it seems like the genome is readily available. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001498.1

And it seems like the spots that have to be mutated are already known about: https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/researchers-cl...

And this experiment has already been done: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8080110/

Five minutes of research suggests the sites -- Loop Epitope etc -- only need a few pairs of mutations each. this feels doable... It's not creating a supervirus from whole cloth, but why bother. Measles without a vaccine would be a catastrophe.

Even with the genome available, a lot of humans will have to be experimented on to ensure the efficacy of the "supervirus". Just as we still need a lot of experimentation to determine the efficacy of new treatments.