[1] John Shawcross is a fundamentalist Christian who is disappointed that safe sex has limited the spread of HIV/AIDS, which he considers to be God's punishment for sexual immorality.
His new virus evolves in four steps by encoding the RNA of the person infected into its own, thereby rendering universal vaccination impossible.
Rich Horton, writing at the SF Site, calls "Virologist" "particularly memorable",[3] while Jonathan Strahan describes it as a "standout".
[4] Karen Burnham, writing in the New York Review of Science Fiction, however, considers Shawcross to be "cartoonish",[5] and in her 2014 biography of Egan says that it is a "heavy-handed critique" and "obviously contrived", with "the author's thumb on the scales.
"[6] Egan has described the story as "a fairly direct response to religious fundamentalists blathering on about AIDS being God's instrument".