Originally Posted by
vyperdriver
Serious question because I don't know the answer, and I'm not typically a conspiracy theorist, but can a virus be engineered to have an attenuation schedule?
Serious answer: not a chance in hell (maybe a God-like intellect could, but we can't).
While most living cells in multi-cell organisms have a mechanism to limit reproduction cycles (to prevent runaways, aka cancer), that would be hard to do for a virus. Also viruses reproduce a LOT, many, many orders of magnitude more than the cells in your body, so the odds of such a mechanism surviving intact for long is very low. Also the mechanism itself would be a molecular chain, kind of like a crypto-currency blockchain in reverse... in a cell the chain starts long and gets shorter each time it reproduces, when it runs out, you're done. I suspect it would not be possible to fit a long enough chain into a virus to get any sort of meaningful number of cycles (a virus will reproduce billions of times as it spreads through a large host population).
Also very hard to do anything like that without leaving genetic evidence, and that would be very dangerous. COVID for example has killed enough Americans to be considered a large-scale WMD attack if it were intentional... and the likely US response to that is fairly obvious (hint: we only possess one type of WMD).