Whoever finds what I'm looking for will not only be in my good graces, but you will go on to fame and fortune and have your name printed in the auspicious MIT Tech.
On the /random/ board of 8ch, in either August or September of 2019, there was a thread where unknown parties were discussing the creation of a novel virus. They considered a racially targeted virus but then moved on and decided that targeting people according to whether they smoke or if they are obese made "more sense from a moral standpoint."
The thread initially posited the question as to what the greatest percentage of the population that could be culled would be without creating supply chain disruptions and labor shortages. There was a discussion and a consensus of 1% was settled on – the exact lethality of COVID-19.
The release of the virus wound up being just about a month after the thread surfaced. The thread, like all the others was archived automatically. At some point since then, 8kun underwent some kind of data loss and the archives of this board now only go back as far as May 11, 2020.