The difference between armchair disease researcher and home-grown bioterrorist is too fine a line for anyone to evaluate accurately without an interview, so they’re correct in erring on the side of false negative rejections here (and as their message indicates, they accepted that outcome). Creating disease spread maps and evaluating virus function are two of the ways I’m seeing people in this post try to armchair this problem; neither are necessary. I don’t have any recommendations other than “take a basic infectious disease college course” so that y’all can learn to assess these things without resorting to asking an AI to model epidemics.