Special Episode: Engineering the Apocalypse

And if the power goes out, how.

Do we reach the Internet? And with no Internet, how do we find out? Well, practically anything that we need to know to navigate this unprecedented existential threat. Now imagine you're a frontline worker at the power plant or caring for the sick or delivering food. People are getting wiped out at 50 to 100 times the rate of COVID It's a coin toss as to whether you'll survive. If you get sick, do you report to work, or do you hunker down with your loved ones at home until you all get really hungry? Supply chains disintegrate. In situations like this. The grocery stores that actually open sell out, not just out of toilet paper, and they don't get restocked. And pretty much everything else disintegrates, too. For all of its horror, Covid hasn't shut down the power, the water, law enforcement, or the flow of information. But something this lethal could just shut them all down. And while you may be more imaginative than I am, I just can't picture civilizations surviving an encounter with something this deadly. And the problem is, we're on a collision course with some version of this scenario. Hi, I'm Rob Reed, and I've been worried about artificially modified viruses for a few years now. My background is that I'm a longtime tech entrepreneur who went on to become a writer. I write science fiction for Random House, and I'm also a science writer and science podcaster. A while back, I wrote four articles for medium about artificial pandemics and other subjects that led to an episode on my own podcast, which is called the after on podcast and mostly considers fairly deep scientific issues in ways that non experts can follow. That particular episode was a conversation with the thinker and entrepreneur naval Ravikant, and it led directly to a talk that I gave on the Ted conference's main stage. About a year and a half ago. I'll be integrating some of that earlier work here and then building on it in this short series. In the course of it, I believe I'll persuade you that an engineered pandemic will almost inevitably happen eventually, unless we take some very serious preventive steps. And I'll tell you exactly what those steps are. We'll also talk about the science and techniques that are at play here, about the sorts of people who might actually want to inflict a pandemic on the world and what drives them. But first, a big spoiler. I may not sound like one, but I'm an incurable optimist. I wouldn't be telling you all this if I wasn't convinced this story can have a happy ending. And more than anything, this series is about navigating our way toward one. I'll start out with this strange claim that we actually got rather lucky with COVID Not in an absolute sense, obviously. This is clearly the most horrifying year humanity's endured in quite some time. But compared to what might have happened, in terms of sheer deadliness. Now, I say this with a caveat, that it's hard to know exactly how deadly Covid is in percentage terms. We can't just use simple ratios of deaths to officially reported cases, because huge numbers of cases never get diagnosed. Many people who catch COVID never get symptoms, for one thing. And for those who do get sick, testing capacity is notoriously inadequate, so countless cases go undetected. But adjusting for all this murkiness, the World Health Organization estimates that between a half a percent and 1% of infected people die. And in many age groups, it's a tiny fraction of 1%. And I'm saying we got lucky because there is no biological reason why the death rate had to be this low. I mean, take SARS. It killed about 10% of the people it infected. That's an order of magnitude worse than Covid. And we were lucky with SARS, too, in that people got so obviously sick so fast, patients were easy to identify in quarantine before they spread the disease very far. So fewer than a thousand people died of it. But if SARS had been like Covid and spread like mad when people were still asymptomatic or thought they just had a cold, we'd be living in a very different and badly diminished world right now. And SARS is a kitten compared to Middle east respiratory syndrome, or MERS, which kills over a third of its victims. So we're incredibly lucky. Mers just doesn't happen to be very contagious. And then MERS is mild compared to h five n one flu, which kills about 60% of the people who catch it, making it even deadlier than Ebola. So, thank God, it's insanely hard to catch. How insanely hard? Well, the World Health Organization tallied every instance of h five n one over a decade and came up with just 630 cases and 375 deaths. To put that scale in perspective, lightning kills about 60,000 people in a typical decade. So h five n one is barely contagious at all. In its natural form, that is. But unfortunately, there's an artificial form of h five n one as well. It exists because several years ago, some scientists started poking at the virus in hopes of understanding just how dangerous it could be. Since it was plenty deadly, but barely transmissible, they set out to create a contagious form of it. And you heard me right. They deliberately produced an artificial version of this ghastly virus with a terrifyingly high potential to spread easily between people.

This incident is the basis of the.

Grim pandemic scenario I opened with a contagious, modified form of h five n one, killing half the people it infects. The researchers made this monster by manipulating its genes via passing the virus between several generations of ferrets, ferrets being common standins for humans and virus research. Eventually, they had a strain that could pass from ferret to ferret without any contact through the air. The head of the dutch team, Ron Fauci, candidly admitted that his creation was, quote, probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make over in the US. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity didn't disagree. In a press statement, it said that the modified virus's release could result in, quote, an unimaginable catastrophe for which the world is inadequately prepared. Coming from an organization that's not known for drama, the words unimaginable catastrophe are bone chilling. If that's not scary enough for you, I'll add that this work wasn't done in the world's most secure labs, literally, because both the Wisconsin and Holland facilities were certified biosafety level three, which is a big notch below the top rating of biosafety level four. This isn't very reassuring, given the history of deadly substances erupting from profoundly secure labs. Think of the anthrax attacks of 2001, when the lethal spores found their way from a US army lab to the offices of the Senate majority leader. Or consider that the last person killed by smallpox caught it because a british lab let the bug escape after decades of globally coordinated efforts had eradicated it from the entire planet. Or consider Britain's 2007 foot and mouth disease outbreak, which began with a leak from a biosafety level four lab. Incidents like these make it blindingly clear that any pathogen can potentially escape from any lab, because humans are fallible, and so are labs of any biosafety level. Knowing these facts, what kind of person brings into existence a pandemic ready bug that could be a hundred times deadlier than Covid, that could kill a majority of the people it infects and perhaps be wildly contagious? In this case, not evil people. These were virologists who thought their research would help us face subsequent natural mutations in h five n one. But they were shooting dice with our future. And given their equipment and sophistication, they didn't need to ask any outsiders permission to do that.

They may have run things by an.

Internal review board of some kind, but they only needed outside permission to publish their results once they were done. And they did encounter some speed bumps on that front. But no regulator, no judge, no outside body of neutral citizens was in a position to say, don't you dare take that gamble, however small it may be on humanity's future. To say your judgment alone does not give you clearance to perhaps spent millions of lives on your assistant never screwing up, or on your lab not being just a little bit imperfect. I call this sort of thing privatizing the apocalypse. By this, I mean that at the dawn of the Cold War, playing chicken with doomsday went from being something no one could do because it was impossible with pre atomic weapons, to something that two people could do. Kennedy and Khrushchev, Nixon and Brezhnev, Reagan and Gorbachev, etc. This transition traumatized generations. But the leaders represented giant countries with hundreds of millions of citizens, which made the act of risking annihilation a perverse form of public good. This approximate situation is still with us, and there's obviously plenty to dislike about that. But at least we've only needed to keep a fairly low number of decision makers in line. People who spend years looking after a nation's well being, who have major international obligations they hopefully take somewhat seriously, and who are subject to certain checks, balances, and failsafes.