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@soapone @Hoss Pneumonic plague or that from many other pathogenic bacteria is another matter. Especially since unlike pretty much every other bioweapon it's contagious.

Your lungs have a lot of area to infect, they normally don't have a lot of good bacteria for ecological competition, certainly nothing like your gut where they help you digest your food, synthesize vitamin K etc. Breath in an aresol and unless your doctor can figure that out quickly the patient frequently dies first. That can also happen from too many bacteria dying and releasing toxins inside them after getting antibiotics.

Long ago heard Nth hand about a microbiologist who opened a flask of salmonella he didn't realize was under pressure....

And, yeah, antibiotics will take out susceptible good bacteria, which tends to mess up your gut biome for a while, and that can be bad, but probiotics have been a thing since the late 1960s at the latest. There's also concern that a biowarfare strain will have resistance to common antibiotics added to it; isolation and quarantine is how you deal with that sort of thing.

That normally makes it less fit in competition with good bacteria, since it's doing needless stuff or otherwise gimped unless under antibiotic pressure, but in this mode of transmission that doesn't matter.

There's a theory the Battle of Stalingrad was seriously aided by the use of tularemia ("rabbit fever") and the Soviets took it very seriously after that. See the infamous Sverdlovsk anthrax leak in 1979.

BTW, don't trust anything (((Meselson))) says after 1972; at best he got too invested in the Biological Weapons Convention he helped bring about and frequently denied or downplayed subsequent violations of it. One particularly ludicrous example is "bee feces." :cirnoStare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Meselson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_rain

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