I am a former FDA COO and Harvard faculty member, and a decades-long infectious disease spread risk management expert. (It’s the rate, depth, and breadth of “spread” that counts.) At the FDA, I co-led its last major internal reform. At Harvard, I taught policy, law, and management courses, including risk management.
It seems my nearly full-time job today is to repeatedly blow the whistle on where America is and where it now continues to head when protecting its people from the ravages of the next wave of pandemic, endemic, local, or enterprise sized deadly pathogenic attack, whether the attack is nature-made or human-manufactured. The story is not good.
America and the world have improved little in this regard over the ages, from killing up to as many as half the world’s population by not controlling the spread of the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages, at least 675,000 Americans (and 21M more worldwide) from not controlling the spread of the Flu in 1918, and at least 1.6M Americans (and as many as 5.2M more worldwide) from not controlling the spread of COVID-19 in 2019.
And yet, we continue to use mostly the same old strategies and tools today. Let’s wake up ourselves and others. Given Iran’s current eagerness to support terrorist groups in committing atrocities, the human-manufactured bio-attack dangers today are far greater than they were even in 2019.
Nature keeps blasting us. And now we also have a significant risk of lone-wolf, group, and nation-state terrorism to deal with. It is believed by some that there are as many as 3,000 Iranian agents embedded in the US, just waiting to launch a chemical or bio attack on America.
The long-held belief of a high risk of nuclear attack is now passe. Given its overwhelming power and easy traceability, only an insane nation-state would use (or enable or allow to be used) a nuclear weapon today. And we can do nothing to prevent, mitigate, or control the damages from that big an attack.
The second leg of devastation, the use of chemical weapons, can happen, but their use is far less impactful than nuclear attacks. And chemical attacks, no matter how large, do not spontaneously and vastly grow once seeded.
On the other hand, a well-planned bioattack keeps growing and growing, like a fire does. However, bio spread is different and far more likely to be spread more swiftly and broadly because each infected individual carries the pathogenic torch everywhere they go--office to office, plant to plant, town to town, city to city, and state to state.
