This article is five years old and quite amazing, in part because of that fact. Here is one of the middle paragraphs:
....Those that do keep working, medics and police in particular, are likely to catch the virus. We should expect that most economic activity, public services, production of essential goods, and transportation may cease. To minimize inventory costs, businesses, even hospitals, now have “just-in-time” delivery of supplies, sourced from lowest-cost providers on the other side of the world. Even if your local trucker decides to continue working, with multiple long-distance suppliers and shippers involved in moving foodstuffs, a contagious pandemic would certainly disrupt the flow of essential goods. Panic-buying and hoarding will add to the problem of getting food to the population. How long will our public water supplies continue functioning when maintenance personnel fail to report for work? Our highly interdependent, just-in-time delivery economy is very vulnerable to disruptions. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an expert in risk and thinking about rare events, points this out: “Our connected world appears to be more efficient. But when there is a disturbance, the setback is much harder to handle. Not only are we building riskier systems, but also the risks involved in failure are a lot larger.”6....Oh.
From The American Interest, September 20, 2016
The growing ease of genetically modifying bacteria and viruses presages real trouble ahead.
The world is likely entering the age of bioengineered viral pandemics and collapse—BVPC for short. New technologies like bioengineering enable terrorist groups, or even one dedicated individual, to modify and release new viruses that could cause both a pandemic and, as people react, a likely collapse in economic activity and possibly even of law and order. Many experts say natural or bioengineered viral pandemics (BVP) are inevitable as it becomes increasingly easier to modify an existing pathogen, making it more lethal and transmissible. Should there be a deliberately loosed pandemic, revolutionary changes will flood our economy, military, foreign policy; we will not live as before during the Age of Bioengineered Viral Pandemics and Collapse.This bleak Age may be unavoidable, but we can prepare ourselves to minimize its dangers. Yet the specter of biological attack, especially by hard-to-identity and hold-to-account (let alone deter) non-state actors, is little addressed by the media or even inside the U.S. government. Nuclear terrorism we fear and try to deal with, no doubt because we have mental images of nuclear weapons going off to provide a sense of dark possibility. But we seem to suffer from a near total failure of imagination when it comes to bioterrorism, even though for a host of technical and other reasons—simpler engineering, much lower cost, quicker critical mass generation, smaller cadre of workers, smaller facilities for concealment purposes and ordnance delivery—it would be vastly easier for bad non-state actors to master a bio-attack than a nuclear one. We need to overcome that failure of imagination.
In December 2011 national media reported that scientists had created a deadly virus with 60 percent lethality. Since then, new “CRISPR” technology makes it much easier to manipulate DNA—with kits as cheap as $130 available.Genetic engineering, or bioengineering, is the manipulation of an organism’s genetic material. Scientists have been creating genetically modified organisms (GMO) since the 1970s, and in 2010 the first synthetic new life form was created. Genetic modifications are common in nature—that’s why we continuously get new strains of flu and have had viral pandemics (like the 1918 Spanish Flu) on account of some of them. Now it is possible to accelerate genetic change, creating viruses and bacteria that never existed. With newer techniques, a simple, cheap lab (perhaps in a neighbor’s garage) can generate millions of recombinants in minutes. Through bioengineering a lone terrorist or a Revolutionary Guards lab in Iran can intentionally create a human-to-human transmissible version of avian flu, or modify a lethal virus to have a longer latency period, which would facilitate its undetected spread.While biotechnology promises great new treatments and advances in medicine, it will also likely be used to design such deadly new viruses. It is too late to stop the spread of this technology and its misuse. We have been so cavalier about this mounting problem that we have never bothered to assemble a national or a global data base so that we have some sense of what kind of experimentation is going on for what purposes and under whose aegis. The only good news is that well-prepared people and nations should be able to survive and adapt.As Tara O’Toole, former director of Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, warned in congressional testimony: “We are in the midst of a bioscientific revolution that will make building and using biological weapons even more deadly and increasingly easy.”1 The Director of National Intelligence has added bioengineering technology like CRISPR to the list of mass-destruction threats. If a lone terrorist or lunatic launches the virus, it may not spread far before we detect it and limit the devastation. But if an enemy nation spreads a bioengineered virus with high lethality and transmissibility, plus a long period when carriers are contagious but not suffering from the illness or symptoms, it might kill hundreds of millions. This scenario could leave survivors in a radically disrupted social, political, economic, and security environment for years.A bioengineered virus, launched in our crowded, interconnected world by an enemy working to spread it widely before it is detected, could yield a more devastating pandemic than anything experienced in the past. Smallpox killed as many as 90 percent of the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas during the European conquest of the New World, and it killed 500 million people in the 20th century. A smallpox outbreak could be even worse now, since our immunity has expired and our populations are far more vulnerable.A smallpox outbreak could be even worse now, since our immunity has expired and our populations are far more vulnerable. For example, Stanford Professor Dr. Nathan Wolfe warns that, “if terrorists ever got their hands on one of the few remaining vials of smallpox, the results would be devastating.”2 Smallpox has been found in recent years in laboratories, and its genetic code has been posted on the internet.Eckard Wimmer, who headed the team of researchers at SUNY Stonybrook that made live polio virus from scratch as part of a Defense Department project to prove the threat of synthetic bioweapons, said that any one of thousands of members of the American Society for Virology could figure out how to do the same. Rob Carlson, a physicist-turned-biologist, like many others in the biotech field, warned that developing lethal viruses is increasingly cheap and easy. There is no need for a national program, a big lab, expensive equipment or specialized expertise. With a human-to-human transmissible virus there is no need for difficult weaponization efforts—the malefactor could readily find a simple means of infecting people in crowded public transportation centers and let them spread the virus.
A virus released in multiple airports would reach every city and probably most small towns in the United States within a few days. Moreover, if the virus is genetically modified, the limited supply of vaccines we have for smallpox may not even work.If smallpox is too difficult to obtain or synthetically create, someone can use a deadly virus like Ebola or avian flu—viruses still active in areas of the world. Donald Henderson and other scientists, writing in an article on biosecurity, warned that H5N1 avian influenza kills about 60 percent of its victims, compared to just 2 percent for the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed about fifty million:
Like all influenza strains, H5N1 is constantly evolving in nature. But thankfully, this deadly virus does not now spread readily through the air from person to person. If it evolved to become as transmissible as normal flu and results in a pandemic, it could cause billions of illnesses and deaths around the world.”3In 2011, Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam turned the H5N1 virus into a possible human-to-human flu by infecting ferrets repeatedly until a form of H5N1 that could spread through the air from one mammal to another resulted. This was not high-tech bioengineering, but simply swabbing the noses of the infected ferrets and using the gathered viruses to infect another round.A team of scientists at China’s National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory combined H5N1 with genetic attributes found in dozens of other types of flu. Some of their “man-made super-flu strains” could spread through the air between guinea pigs, killing them. This was condemned by scientists around the world as “appalling irresponsibility” since the new viral strains created by mixing bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory and cause a global pandemic—killing millions of people. With researchers tampering with H5N1 to make it human-to-human transmissible, we should not be surprised if terrorists and some state regimes are doing so as well.....
....MUCH MORE
We do not like Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.
June 18, 2021Hey, Remember Those Wacky Dutch Scientists Who Weaponized Bird Flu To Kill Half The World's Population?
I had forgotten about Ron Fouchier until a friend sent an article from the journal Science. But sure enough we had November 2011's "UPDATED--"Dutch Scientists Have Genetically Altered the H5N1 Bird Flu Virus to Make it More Contagious" (could kill half humanity)" and then when they wanted to publish the recipe and the U.S. said no: "Psychotic Dutch Scientists: "Killer flu doctors: US censorship is a danger to science".Our outro from that long ago post was
"The U.S. National Institutes of Health funded the research. They own it. If Fouchier doesn't understand the implications of publication the NIH had to step in. This is just nuts."And the article from Science?
March 9, 2012Surprising Twist in Debate Over Lab-Made H5N1....
