I’m becoming extremely concerned we are massively unprepared for the next epidemic.
People imagine that any kind of epidemic that occurs today can be more or less mitigated through modern public health infrastructure, stocks of vaccines and antivirals, and basic quarantining measures.
The issue is that in modern, densely populated cities, a sufficiently advanced pathogen would be capable of infecting the vast majority of inhabitants in weeks, before any health measures could have an effect. The population density is enough that current quarantining techniques used in cases like smallpox would be completely ineffective. Antivirals have historically proven ineffective and hard to disseminate while our current vaccine stocks might not work at all.
Currently computer simulations indicate that a dangerous enough pathogen could effectively destroy a city like Los Angeles in a few months. “Destroyed” in the sense that emergency services are shut down, medical services are shut down, all economic output ceases and over 30-60% of the population is wiped out.
In short, a small nation-state or even well-funded terrorist organization could easily reduce the US to the state of a third world nation with. Yet no one seems to give a shit
There has been a lot of work done with engineering viruses for specific functions such as gene therapy. The main problem and the reason a lot of this research is highly restricted is that many of the same techniques for engineering a virus to kill off all mosquitoes can be applied to almost any target, including hominids.
That and the risk of spillover. You might intend to wipe out mosquitoes, but you end up wiping out a whole class of insects causing complete ecological collapse.
Of course if you’re a terrorist that probably sounds delightful. I’m obviously biased but I considered biological agents, especially viruses, to the be the most dangerous thing in the world today, even more so than nuclear weapons due to their relative affordability and ease of dispersal.
China is one major source of concern. Not only is the place a massive breeding ground for novel agents due to poor agricultural practices, the proximity of humans to animals ensures that novel strains of influenza and other viruses will hop to humans and spread like wildfire.
It literally only takes one mutation of one virus to unleash a pandemic. Every infectious pig or bird is a little viral containment vessel that could birth the next plague.
Though I’d be surprised if China is actively doing large-scale tests on their population, it wouldn’t surprise me. That said, China’s biological weapons program is much larger than the public or even experts in the field are aware of. They are almost certainly genetically engineering certain viruses (smallpox) to be vaccine immune, but they are probably also engineering them to be more lethal agents in general. We really don’t know the full scale of China’s biological weapons program but I would bet you wouldn’t be able to sleep well if you knew its full scope.
But theoretically, any well-stocked university lab with trained professionals would be capable of genetically modifying a virus to do all sorts of things.
The most difficult thing would be gaining access to some of the more virulent agent such as smallpox or Ebola. Most of these are only available in incredibly well guarded facilities in just a few countries.
North Korea likely has a decently sized biological weapons program as well as a cache of some of the more deadly pathogens. A desperate worker there could theoretically smuggle out any number of terrible diseases and sell them on the black market for $10-$100k, which for a lot of terrorist organizations would be a pittance.
Publicly, we have ceased production of biological weapons. Privately, we already know how to make effective dispersal munitions, and the kind of viral engineering work we do for the purpose of “good” can just as easily be repurposed for evil. If the US military wanted it could quite easily engineer and disperse a literal apocalyptic plague for less money than it takes to build an F-35.
Hypothetically, if our government turned fully tyrannical and evil a-la Nazi Germany, we could have a very robust biological weapons program producing munitions within a year or so… if we don’t already.
I’ve run across a few documents that scared me pretty badly.
One was regarding what are called chimera viruses and research work done in the Soviet Union and more recently in North Korea (hypothesized).
The simple idea of a chimera virus is you combine two viral agents into one, which as you can imagine would make it easy to create a virus with more than 95% mortality rate.
The scarier part is that a chimera virus can theoretically have multiple traits that make it far superior as a biological weapon, and the traits can present at different time periods. For example, Ebola is quite deadly, but it’s actually pretty hard to spread due to needing direct blood contact.
So what would happen if you combined Ebola with say, a common flu? With sufficiently advanced engineering, you could have an Ebola that initially only presents as a standard flu for the first 1-2 weeks. People would continue to take flights, go to work etc thinking it was just a relatively harmless flu.
Then two weeks later you’d have massive “mysterious” outbreaks of Ebola all across the world. Millions of people would suddenly present with symptoms of Ebola and be freaking out.
Meanwhile, people who still had the “flu” would continue taking flights, going to work etc.
By the time we discovered that the flu and Ebola outbreaks were all a part of the same virus, you’d be looking at easily over 100 million dead, completely collapsed infrastructures etc. It would be unprecedented in modern times.
Hypothetically there was a country that wanted to create a doomsday weapon that would function even beyond the deterrent capabilities of nuclear weapons. Basically a “Screw you, world” kind of weapon.
If certain dissidents are to be believed, this weapon has been produced, likely still exists, and may have even been used at some point.
The key feature of the virus is the incubation period. The claim is they extended the incubation period of a certain highly lethal virus to not days, or weeks, but possibly a decade or more, (Think AIDS).
During this extended incubation, the number of virus particles is low enough that it shows zero symptoms, and it would be undetectable unless you were actually looking for it. While transmission rates would be quite low, over the course of a couple years it should be able to easily spread throughout an entire population. A literal 100% rate of infection.
Now this has been known about in the scientific and military communities for a while.
Well one group had the idea of testing this. Is there a latent and highly lethal virus lying dormant in the population?
They took blood samples from people across the US as well as some Western European countries and discovered something quite disturbing. A mysterious virus, referred to internally as “pathogen X” present in something like 95% of the samples.
It’s an unusually large virus with a very particular shape, like a large toroid, ( a toroid is a surface of revolution with a hole in the middle, like a doughnut, forming a solid body. The axis of revolution passes through the hole), with spiky protuberances along the central axis.
The genome is HUGE, and that makes knowing its actual payload at this stage almost impossible. It shares significant similarities with smallpox, Lassa, influenza, and HIV, but it neither looks nor behaves like any of these.
So the conclusion at this point is an uncomfortable one. You are likely infected by a mysterious virus that might be nothing, or it may become active at some point and almost certainly kill you.
Basic sanitary practices work quite well, (sort of). Keep your house clean, and if possible the surrounding area. Don’t over clean, though.
If you live in a dense city, it’s not the worst idea to wear a medical mask in very crowded spaces (buses/subway) and keep a bottle of Purrell on you.
Obviously, getting away from population dense urban areas before infection would be one of the best ways to protect yourself. The problem is you and everyone else would have the same idea so there is no guarantee freeways would even be functional in a mass panic. You’d need to move quickly after the first signs in the news of some “Mysterious new illness” started appearing.
Sleep well, kiddies.
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