It’s September 2022. COVID-19 has been felled thanks to vaccine dissemination and better treatment protocols, but the fallout from the pandemic has financially drained economies all across the world and broken the resolve of traditional alliances.
A few months later, a mysterious virus suddenly appears in Frankfurt, Germany and Caracas, Venezuela. It is a serious respiratory disease that spreads person-to-person, with a shockingly high fatality rate. Scientists realize that this illness is a novel strain of the human parainfluenza virus, but also contains genetic elements of the Nipah virus. Baffled medical experts dub the disease Clade X. Clade X accelerates across the world within weeks, and pockets of the disease begin to pop up across the United States. Medical facilities become overwhelmed. People are dying by the thousands. As scientists grapple with the heightened virulence and contagiousness of the disease, a fringe group with a goal towards the destruction of humanity releases a statement claiming responsibility for the intentional weaponization and release of the virus. Clade X spreads rapidly and has dire consequences – within a year, 150 million people are dead, with 15 million dying in the United States alone.
Does this scare you? Because it should.
This is a fictionalized scenario – one that has been simulated before. This is an exercise the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security put on two years ago to highlight the uncertainties in current prevention and response capabilities in regards to pandemics.
Over the past 4.5 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen how large of a toll it has had not just in the United States, but across the world. Millions of people have lost their jobs, forced to shelter inside and only venture outdoors if absolutely necessary. People have not been able to see or visit their loved ones. Schools shut down, forcing millions of parents to juggle full-time jobs while simultaneously becoming full-time teachers for their children. Our healthcare system has been pushed to its breaking point.
The economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the massive threat that diseases and pathogens have on the rest of the world, especially those that are intentionally weaponized. COVID-19 has highlighted how massively unprepared we are for these situations.
I am not claiming that COVID-19 is an intentionally weaponized pathogen – scientific evidence has proven that it is not. However, biological threats – whether they are naturally occurring or released through accidental or intentional means – pose a serious risk to life as we know it.
We need to be especially terrified now in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In an article for Axios, Bryan Walsh goes as far as to argue that a state actor (e.g. North Korea) or a non-state actor (e.g. a terrorist organization) could be influenced by the impact of COVID-19 to potentially pursue biological weapons capabilities.
Utilizing a pathogen as a violent tool is not a new concept. Arguably the most infamous case of this is colonists giving blankets infected with smallpox to Native Americans during the French and Indian War. We are also all aware of the public terror that emerged with the Amerithrax letters in 2001. The attack, which killed five Americans and left seventeen seriously ill, is the worst biological attack in U.S. history.
The threat of an intentional biological incident has also drastically increased due to new technologies, including DNA synthesis and gene editing. Former U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper first included gene editing as a threat posed by a “[weapon] of mass destruction and proliferation” back in the 2016 Worldwide Threat Assessment. It was once again included in last year’s Worldwide Threat Assessment, writing:
Rapid advances in biotechnology, including gene editing, synthetic biology, and neuroscience, are likely to present new economic, military, ethical, and regulatory challenges worldwide as governments struggle to keep pace. These technologies hold great promise for advances in precision medicine, agriculture, and manufacturing, but they also introduce risks, such as the potential for adversaries to develop novel biological warfare agents, threaten food security, and enhance or degrade human performance.
Gene editing is particularly dangerous because, as Max Brooks wrote for Foreign Policy, it “allows anyone to spin straw into lethal gold.” What he meant by this is that biotechnology allows for a malicious actor to obtain germs from anywhere and modify it in such a way that it spreads faster and is resistant to treatment and/or a vaccine – thus rendering the pathogen to be even deadlier from what it would normally be. The consequences of this would be catastrophic. A human-engineered pathogen could rapidly spread across continents and kill thousands of people before the international community even realizes they have been hit by an intentional biological attack.
There is an additional difference that in my opinion makes an intentional biological incident even more dangerous than a natural (i.e. non-human engineered) pandemic – the presence of the malicious actor(s) who engineered and released the deadly pathogens in the first place. In the event the world falls under a Clade X-like pandemic, we will not only have to contend with the social and economic repercussions, but also the national security risks of malicious actors having these biological weapons capabilities. Once a malicious actor knows how to “spin the lethal gold,” they can continue to recreate, re-engineer, and re-release human-engineered pathogens again and again. This brings about a very unique challenge that policymakers must be preparing for in advance, which is something that the federal government is still failing to address today.
The United States does have a National Biodefense Strategy – written in 2018, it highlights five overarching goals for strengthening the United States’ biodefense strategy:
Goal 1: Enable Risk Awareness to Inform Decision-Making Across the Biodefense Enterprise
Goal 2: Ensure Biodefense Enterprise Capabilities to Prevent Bioincidents
Goal 3: Ensure Biodefense Enterprise Preparedness to Reduce the Impacts of Bioincidents
Goal 4: Rapidly Respond to Limit the Impacts of Bioincidents
Goal 5: Facilitate Recovery to Restore the Community, the Economy, and the Environment
On paper, these goals look promising. However, they are, quite frankly, lacking. Upon closer review at the specific policies outlined under each goal, I was left with even more questions:
- Who and/or which agency/organization is in charge of executing this Strategy?
- How will human and monetary resources be allocated for this Strategy?
- In the past two years since this Strategy was first outlined, what steps has the government taken so far to kickstart it?
To be blunt – without these answers, this document will inevitably get bogged down in bureaucratic politics. Failing to address these concerns now means millions more will die in the future.
To alleviate these concerns, I have outlined a few suggestions below:
- Clearly establish inter-agency cooperation within the Federal Government to ensure a unified strategy in responding to a bioincident. One of the biggest hindrances with the National Biodefense Strategy is that it does not specify which government agencies are in charge of different parts of the strategy. Ensuring cooperation within the government is critical to ensuring success of the overall strategy in the future.
- Collaborate with allied nations and international agencies on emerging bioweapons technologies and enhancements in medical research. Pandemics are a global issue – the United States cannot strive to deal with the repercussions of a pandemic alone.
One could argue that now is not the right time to be discussing this, considering we are in the middle of a non-human engineered pandemic, which has brought about drastic global consequences that need to be addressed in the short term. However, I would argue that now is the perfect time to be discussing the threat of a human-engineered virus being intentionally released because we are currently in a pandemic. Lewis Carroll once said, “Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.” We cannot be complacent anymore – we need to start putting our weapons of imagination to good use. If we don’t imagine the worst-case scenario now, we certainly won’t be prepared when it hits us.
Perspectives 