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Cambridge University's strange initiative to address risks of 'future engineered pandemics'.

Cambridge University has announced a major new “initiative to address risks of future engineered pandemics”:

As the web page blurb implies, the University does not believe that Covid-19 was ‘engineered’ but is adamant that we need massive investment into research for a future ‘pandemic’ that is engineered. And of course this research has to be conducted by the usual clique of intellectual elitists.

But, surely if a pandemic can really be ‘engineered’ then the experts who ‘could stop it happening in the first place’ (their words) would be scientists and engineers. So why exactly is the responsibility for this initiative trusted to the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH)?

Maybe they are just being honest. Perhaps they know that, to a very large extent, Covid-19 was a socially engineered pandemic and the ‘next one’ is most likely to be also. After all, naturally you need social scientists to research socially engineered pandemics.

Indeed, in the further details of the initiative we find that one of the major strands to the proposed work is

Modelling threats and risk management of engineered pandemics: will develop the modelling tools needed to design risk management responses;

So, how is this all being funded? The web page states:

The Engineered Pandemics Risk Management Programme is supported by a £5.25 million donation to the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. The team intends it to form a central component of a future Pandemic Risk Management Centre, for which it is now fundraising.

As no details are provided of where the £5.25 million donation came from we have submitted this FOI request to Cambridge University to ask them.