The people behind this program aren't fools. They're experts who have given a lot of thought to this problem. Some basic points should alleviate your fears. First, the mosquito they're trying to eradicate is a non-native species. Second, said mosquito is the primary vector for Dengue fever, which infects hundreds of thousands and kills hundreds in Brazil every year. Even if this mosquito was native to South America, eradicating it would almost certainly help people.
It's interesting how support for this program decreases with distance from it. If this outbreak was happening in your country, hurting your family, killing your friends, I doubt you'd be so loath to support GM solutions.
A side note: 99.9% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct. Nature is not some carefully-balanced system. It is chaos and suffering on a scale we cannot imagine. The majority of wild animals live in a state of constant hunger, pain, and disease. Those with sufficiently complex brains live in fear of predators. Speaking of predators: We would be horrified to watch a man vivisect an antelope, but we pay to watch documentaries of lions doing the same thing. Apparently animal cruelty is fine when it's done by other animals.
Scientists studied getting rid of all mosquitoes globally, and came to the conclusion it wouldn't have much of a negative impact (and a huge net positive for due ending malaria, dengue, etc.) Nothing eats exclusively mosquitoes, and those animals (birds) which do eat them could just switch to other insects, which generally are not in short supply.
>> If this outbreak was happening in your country, hurting your family, killing your friends, I doubt you'd be so loath to support GM solutions.
That's an appeal to shame. It's true that people are generally selfish. And not only those in the developed world. It's also true that, when under physical duress, people can be made to support just about any immoral, illegal or just plain bad idea. Just because the majority of those opposing it are not the same people as those who most stand to benefit directly it does not follow that, in this case, using GM is fine.
> First, the mosquito they're trying to eradicate is a non-native species.
I really don't get the environmentalist emphasis on the world being, and staying, the way god ordained it at the beginning of the universe. Mosquitoes have a generation time measured in weeks; for any practical purpose, there's no such thing as a non-native mosquito. Assuming a mosquito generation length of one month, and a human generation length of 25 years, we can see that a mosquito population that's been around for 5 years is the equivalent of a human one that's been around for 1500.
Trying to distinguish between "native" species and "non-native" species makes all the sense of distinguishing between "anthropogenic global warming" and "natural global warming". There's no point. A phenomenon is good, or it's bad; it's not bad just because you can finger a particular cause, it's not good just because things were that way 100 years ago, and it's not bad just because things were different 10 years ago. Judge by the effects.
The distinction is important because it means that there probably won't be an ecological imbalance if we exterminate the mosquitoes, since there are no species that exclusively depend on them, or which they are responsible for keeping in check.
When you eliminate a native species, the unintended consequences can be wide.
This makes the weird assumption that a non-native species will never occupy any position within the local ecology. Consider a (slightly unintuitive) case of an intrusion into a well-established ecology: maize into human society. Europeans came to America with a level of reliance on maize of exactly zero, since they weren't aware it existed. They brought their own grains. And we grow wheat here today. But... if we decided to completely eliminate maize, would there be any consequences for American society? Or for a case with more historical flavor, consider the introduction of the potato to Ireland. There were problems when the potato population failed.
More generally, if species I ("intrusive") arrives and replaces species A ("autochthonous"), why is removing species I more dangerous than removing species A would have been?
It's interesting how support for this program decreases with distance from it. If this outbreak was happening in your country, hurting your family, killing your friends, I doubt you'd be so loath to support GM solutions.
A side note: 99.9% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct. Nature is not some carefully-balanced system. It is chaos and suffering on a scale we cannot imagine. The majority of wild animals live in a state of constant hunger, pain, and disease. Those with sufficiently complex brains live in fear of predators. Speaking of predators: We would be horrified to watch a man vivisect an antelope, but we pay to watch documentaries of lions doing the same thing. Apparently animal cruelty is fine when it's done by other animals.