On "Biological Warfare: A Scenario"

Author and Journalist Annie Jacobsen imagines a nightmare scenario which takes us to at least one terrible place where Americans have already been

Annie Jacobsen’s new book “Biological Warfare: A Scenario” is a companion piece to her previous book on nuclear war called, appropriately enough, “Nuclear War: A Scenario.” Like that previous outing, this book too is absolutely face-meltingly terrifying, but in a slightly different way… one that feels a little too familiar for comfort.

“Nuclear War: A Scenario,” which I wrote about here and here, describes how America’s nuclear deterrence strategy, nicknamed “MAD” for Mutually Assured Destruction, is designed in such a way that once a nuclear explosion occurs on American soil, the “MAD” process goes into effect, is very quickly automated and almost immediately gets ahead of the humans who are supposed to supervise it… all of which leads inexorably to the end of the world just seventy-two minutes later. Ultimately, the horror of the story is that even as it incinerates every last human on Earth, the system is operating exactly as we designed it to operate.

It’s terrifying of course, and you may not sleep for a few days after reading it, but the book does leave you with some hopeful ideas about how the system could be changed so that the final horrific outcome of the story could be avoided. My own takeaway from the book was that Ronald Reagan was right… we need to immediately begin building factories all over the country which would do nothing but manufacture ICBM interceptors and THAAD missile systems twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

The larger point is that per Jacobsen, “MAD” has off-ramps… they may be narrow, the pavement cracked and pockmarked… they may be covered with foliage and hard to see… they may even be just on the other side of a blind curve and easy to miss at high speed, but there are off-ramps.

“Biological War: A Scenario” on the other hand, offers no off-ramps. Once the plague is loose, something which is completely beyond anyone’s control, it’s all over but the end credits.

But the book does argue that there is at least one very specific thing we absolutely should not be doing, and that to the extent we are doing it we should immediately stop, and that we certainly should not be doing it in the middle of densely packed third-world cities on the territorial land of our sworn enemies… and that One Thing is something we have unfortunately all come to know as “Gain of Function” research.

Which is why I find it an interesting cosmic coincidence that Jacobsen’s book was released on the same day that Anthony Fauci, one of recent American history’s darkest figures, a man who is the only reason why any of us have even heard of “Gain of Function” in the first place, appeared before a Senate committee and refused to answer any questions about his role in leading our Government’s disastrously totalitarian response to the COVID pandemic which began in 2020.

The coincidence is jarring because of one specific detail of Jacobsen’s fictional scenario. In the book, the pathogen which escapes from a bioweapons lab in Siberia (as we now know COVID did from a lab in Wuhan, despite Fauci’s own disinformation campaign) and proceeds to end all human life on Earth, was engineered as a two stage bioweapon. The weapon was designed to kill yes, but the primary goal of its long-ago designers was to kill in a way that would first destroy trust in America’s medical system and ultimately in its Government.

The pathogen Jacobsen uses in her story, one which is probably not science fiction and which may already exist in Russian and Chinese labs, is an engineered “chimera”… two diseases genetically mashed together via gene-splicing. The initial disease, Pneumonic Plague, is fantastically deadly but can be treated by antibiotics if given early enough after infection. However, in the case of this “chimera” pathogen the antibiotic itself is what triggers the secondary disease, which has been diabolically hidden inside the Plague’s genetic code. This second disease is an extremely virulent form of encephalitis and unlike Pneumonic Plague, it has no treatment… it has no cure… it is 100% fatal… and death is excruciating.

Take a minute to think about the implications of that. A terrified populace is told, probably by their own President whom they presumably trust, that the only thing which can save their lives is to receive an antibiotic within the first 24 hours after infection… hopeful patients line up by the millions to receive the only thing that can save them from death, only to discover a few hours later that they have now been infected, via the “cure,” with something even worse.

If you assume, as the Russians must have, that it would be very difficult to completely destroy such a large and geographically dispersed country as the United States via Plague infection alone… and indeed Jacobsen’s book relies on several wild coincidences and a lot of very bad luck to get the disease out into the world in a way that guarantees widespread Plague death… then you might decide that if you can’t kill everyone, at least you can collapse American Democracy by creating so much fear and distrust that the American populace goes to war, not only with its own Government but with its own medical system and the professionals who run it.

For the Russians of the paranoid Cold War period, plunging the United States of America into a new dark age from which it would take centuries to recover, all without firing a shot was the primary goal of this engineered bioweapon. Mass death was simply the gravy on the chicken-fried steak.

And so it was that it occurred to me, as I watched Fauci plead the fifth a hundred some-odd times and all the old fury from the COVID period came flooding back, that a version of this nefarious Russian plan to collapse American Democracy already happened six years ago…. may, in fact, still be happening.

Those of us who obsessively dug into the data contemporaneously knew Fauci’s prescriptions were wrong within a few months of the lockdowns going into effect. But we now know, thanks to the release of Fauci’s diaries which he wrote during the period, that he himself knew his public proclamations were wrong and that they were based on bad science, at the time.

We know now that he is, and was, a malignant narcissist who loved being the focus of so much cultural praise and attention and who was privately admitting to his fellow healthcare professionals as well as to some of the celebrities who were his new best friends, that the draconian measures he was forcing on the country via a germaphobic President whom he had clearly snookered, would not work and were likely to make many other things much worse, from the economy to public health and education outcomes.

Worse, Fauci’s crisis-based total authority allowed him to co-opt critical health institutions like the NIH, the CDC and the WHO… to make them a part of his deception. As a result, enormous percentages, perhaps more than 50% of the country, now no longer trusts these institutions at all. And sadly, what we learned last week is that this mistrust is well-founded. To the extent that there are still Americans who trust Fauci and by extension those critical organizations he corrupted with his self-serving deceptions, his terrible performance last week combined with the revelation of those damning diary entries is already creating a vast cultural revulsion that will undoubtedly push those numbers even higher.

All of which has terrible implications for the next pandemic, whether it is as deadly serious as the one in Jacobsen’s book or not.

So in a sense the real world version of the villains who wanted to collapse American Democracy and who designed the Chimera pathogen which destroys the world in Annie Jacobsen’s book have already scored a major victory. And they didn’t need to kill anyone in order to do it… all they had to do was wait for one malignant narcissist to be elevated to a place of unimpeachable power in a terrified United States.