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Oh, I'm a little drunk, so I forgot the second point. Maybe I'm not devious enough to lead a bioweapons program, but I would think that research into potential bioweapons would primarily focus on a vaccine or a treatment. Nasty disease outbreaks occur naturally, and as we saw with COVID-19, they affect everybody. Why would any nation release a bioweapon that's going to hammer itself just as much as the enemy? That would only make sense to me in maybe a Dead Hand-like scenario, in which your nation has already fallen, and you release it as vengeance from the grave.
But, that still doesn't make sense to me, because we don't have any reliable way to look at a virus and determine its potential for causing a pandemic. That might not even be possible, since there are/were lots of viruses that seem like they should cause a pandemic, but just haven't.