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Conversation with Annie Jacobsen, Biological War · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: I am absolutely thrilled to have one of my favorite people with us today and one of uh the great uh writers of our time.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh wonderful, uh much awarded uh uh investigative reporter Annie Jacobson.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: And uh listeners will remember the wonderful uh session that we had together in January 2025 on her book, Nuclear War, a scenario.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that is an absolutely riveting book, uh, and it had a huge worldwide importance to help people understand what nuclear war really would mean.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: And we're back with uh Annie Jacobson uh to talk about another harrowing scenario.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh this time it's biological war uh a scenario.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: And uh all of us uh have been through COVID.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: We know something about uh biology and pandemics and uh how frightening they are, but we're going to hear something even more frightening uh from Annie Jacobson.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: Let me remind you that she is a scintillating investigative reporter who has been covering uh uh the the beat of uh uh global war, uh espionage uh uh security issues uh among her works, in addition to the two scenarios, one on nuclear war and one on biological war, is a absolutely uh powerful, depressing, extraordinarily informative book uh called Operation Paperclip, which I really recommend to everybody, which is about uh how the United States took in Nazi scientists after World War II to build uh the military technology effort after World War II.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh she has covered the Defense Department's uh uh military innovation wing DARPA in a book called The Pentagon's Brain uh from 2015.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and she has covered uh the CIA um and covert operations in a number of works, but one that is uh superb is Surprise, Kill and Vanish, which is about CIA paramilitary operations, and that's from 2019.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: So, Annie, welcome.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's so good to see you.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you've got uh another uh uh very important book and a very timely book.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh can you tell us uh a little bit about biological war scenario?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'd be interested to know uh when you started thinking about this.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh was it consciously a sequel to nuclear war?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Was it always planned as uh uh to be paired with the nuclear war scenario?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: And um tell us about uh the book and then we'll talk about the scenario, and then I have uh a thousand questions to ask you.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: So good to see you, and thank you for that lovely introduction.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I did not intend to write biological war a scenario after nuclear war, but many of those same subject matter experts deal in counter-proliferation.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: They work trying to keep weapons of mass destruction from actually going off.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um and as I was finishing up those interviews on nuclear, a couple of them said to me, as I have said before, the little bit of a shark in the water feeling.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, Annie, you should look at bio next.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it's completely unnerving that we you and I both know nuclear weapons are by far the most destructive weapons on the planet.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: And yet the Pentagon lists biological weapons as a very close second, and that is because they are the greatest overall threat.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: What do you mean by that?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the barrier for entry is so low.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: When we consider nuclear weapons, what it entails to have one.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Look at Iran right now.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you have to have fissile material, weapons grade uranium or plutonium, and then you have to have a weapons delivery system like an ICBM or a nuclear-powered nuclear capable submarine or a B-2 bomber.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, these arsenals of nuclear weapons are controlled by nation states.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: When you consider bio, that essentially you can make a biological weapon in a lab, and we haven't even talked about, and I don't address in my book AI-enabled bio.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about what scientists can do in a laboratory with modern genetic modifications.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: That is why bio is the greatest overall threat, because according to subject matter experts, not just at the Pentagon, but also who work in pandemic planning, it is the greatest threat because it's the most likely to happen.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's uh worthwhile to recall that uh actually uh the use of biological weapons uh goes back hundreds of years, uh if not thousands of years.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there are famous episodes of uh the European conquistadors and uh the American North American settlers deliberately uh uh throwing uh smallpox infected uh clothing uh and materials uh into uh Indian uh Native American reserves uh with the happy idea of uh creating uh epidemics uh among them.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea of biological warfare uh per se using deadly pathogens to attack uh foes is is very longstanding.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: And you're adding uh a very um crucial point that I want everyone to understand, which is um that uh uh biological warfare can take place with natural pathogens, they're killers.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: But what we have now is uh the capacity to enhance the lethality or the infectivity of these pathogens, uh and that's what can be done.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't have to be a super sophisticated laboratory, does it?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: No, it doesn't.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Just a few genetic tweaks here and there.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing is those that are on record i involve academics.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: So over the past decade, we have seen this acceleration of what is now known in the public eye as gain of function.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's this idea to give a pathogen essentially to gain function within it.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, like you said, you can make something more transmissible, you can make it more virulent, and most nefarious of all, I think, is this idea that you can defeat medical countermeasures that already exist.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: That is so odious and so sinister because you now have this concept built into the weapon of somebody believing they might be protected from a horrific disease, having had a vaccine, for example, only to discover that this pathogen has been tweaked to defeat that vaccine.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: I was reminded uh in the first pages of your book that um the even before we got to advanced uh biotech uh uh a hundred years ago, uh in the the uh context of World War I and its aftermath, the uh realization that biological warfare was uh absolutely real uh and a real risk, and especially uh after the flu pandemic uh that followed World War I and killed millions of people, uh by the way, called the Spanish flu, even though it started uh in United States uh military bases, most likely, uh which is uh a bit of good branding by the United States, but uh we should understand that that was an American flu, not a Spanish flu.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: But uh already in 1925, you point out, the Geneva Convention uh supposedly outlawed biological warfare.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's absolutely right.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, you can go into even more modern times, 1972, after the superpowers, really the United States and the Soviet leading the charge, building up these arsenals of biological weapons.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, our sort of program was enhanced by the Nazi scientists.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for mentioning my book, Operation Paperclip, in the intro.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we were those scientists that we recruited were doing biological warfare, and they were testing certainly on on uh Jews and other concentration camp uh uh inmates uh killing them to test their weapons.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's such a dark-hearted story, sort of like bypassing the idea of you know science using mice, then guinea pigs, then primates, then humans, and like you say, the Nazis just skipping over that and going right to experimenting on humans in concentration camps, because of course they essentially considered them to be rats.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so the fact that we hired these Nazis to then work on our biological weapons program, I think speaks to the very nature of biological weapons in general, that they are absolutely nefarious.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: Could you uh tell people, because it's so chilling, why Operation Paperclip was called Operation Paperclip, because uh everything about that story, Annie, uh, in your book was so depressing and shocking to me.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: But uh the mere fact of the paperclip uh is something that is so normalizing of this uh horror story.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh could you just spend a minute uh before we get to the Well, you know, sometimes the devil is in the detail, as they say.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the the the idea was that one arm of the government was going after Nazi scientists to prosecute them at Nuremberg, and the other, another sort of secret arm of the government that was involved in paperclip was going after Nazis to find out who we could hire.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: So pull them off.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Unimaginable but true.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Unimaginable but true.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so the way the tiny detail that you're referring to is the way in which to like indicate, okay, this really bad Nazi that's on the dock at Nuremberg, we need to get him for our program, they would put a tiny paperclip at the top of his file to indicate, oh, let's move him over into the should we hire him department.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what, Jeff?
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: When I was at the National Archives like getting some of these original files declassified, lo and behold, they came to me with an actual paper clip on it and a rust mark that I swear looked like it was 70 years old.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: Oh God.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh God.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: So we were taking in the Nazi scientists, we were building uh uh exactly this capacity.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and then uh somehow a treaty was reached, the uh Biological Weapons Convention uh in 1972.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds good.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: What happened?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds great.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: How was it reached and and uh and then what happened to it?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there are mixed ideas about why Nixon of all people kind of declared that the United States was going to destroy its entire arsenal of biological weapons, which he did, which allegedly we did.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: But from the history books I've read and the sort of documentation on this, I don't I'm not so sure that Nixon should get, you know, such kudos for doing this, because it's my understanding from reading sources now declassified dialogues he was having with the Pentagon at the time.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: The reason was is because not because, as everyone winded up saying, biological weapons are odious to the conscience of mankind, which they are, but rather that the Pentagon didn't like biological weapons as a weapon because it was not controllable for them.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, they can drop a 2,000-pound bomb on a target and tell you with chilling accuracy how many people will be killed in co-centric circles out from the center point.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: But they cannot do that with biological weapons because there is so much unknown about how infectivity happens, transmissibility.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: There's so much uncertainty in biological weapons that one argument, a very sinister and cynical one, is that the De Pentagon didn't want them because they were not convenient to control.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: So uh remarkably, uh a it this is in uh the height of the Cold War, although uh a moment of so-called detente, uh the Soviet Union and the United States reached an agreement, and that agreement covers uh about 190 countries.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in other words, uh everybody has signed up to the convention, uh to the Biological Weapons Convention.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: So why why do we need your book?
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh it's all there, it's uh all stopped.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: As we now know here in 2026, that there is no enforceability in that protocol whatsoever.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: And even worse, there's a carve-out that you can do work with dangerous pathogens under the premise that it's prophylactic.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, that you're working on a medical countermeasure.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, you have labs all around the world.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: There are now 3,600 or more BSL biosafety level 3 or biosafety level 4 labs.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: How many?
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: 3,600?
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: 3,600.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, but 110 of them are BSL four.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's where you work on pathogens with absolutely no known cure, Ebola, hemorrhagic fever virus, I mean NIPA.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then the BSL three labs is where you can work on plague, anthrax, hantavirus.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, as the book makes very clear with a few genetic tweaks, you can make plague into something that will have a hundred percent case fatality rate.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I really think one should see these total of 3,600 labs as the same degree of danger.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: It is absolutely uh stunning that a treaty of such profound significance doesn't build within it meticulously and consciously the means for monitoring, verification, and enforcement.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's just not there.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: A former Assistant Secretary of State told me it's a cross your fingers and hope approach.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: How could you possibly think that is a good idea in the world in which we live?
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: You must have verification situations.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: And not only that, I learned something very interesting from a lot of the scientists involved, is that it's not just having diplomats or inspectors going over and looking at these WMD facilities as we used to have with nuclear.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: But the scientists involved explained something to me that was so interesting and so hopeful, and I hope we can get back to.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that when you have this kind of transparency as an ideal, what ends up happening is the scientists from these air quote adversarial nations end up having a dialogue.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: For example, in the book, The Inciting Incident That Sets It All Off, is an accident at a BSL 4 lab in Siberia.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Vector.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's a real BSL 4 lab.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's where the Soviet biological weapons program took place.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And there was actually an accident, an explosion at Vector in 2019.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, no dangerous pathogens were released then in the book that I write, the scenario.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: That is not the case.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: The pathogens are released, it's a plague.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: But in the 2019 instance, I learned from the scientists involved that immediately while the U.S.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: State Department, while the U.S.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: military was on sort of, you know, the communication trying to get word from Moscow what was going on, you had scientists from the United States reaching out directly to the vector scientists saying, hey, is it really true that this explosion happened essentially like in a janitor's cabinet and not where the dangerous pathogens were held?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And wow, that that is now missing and becoming increasingly rare is a danger to all of us.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: What I think is uh also uh extremely important uh the point you mentioned, not only I as I understand it, uh Annie, there isn't uh direct uh monitoring and verification or reviews or uh visits or anything like that that one might think in addition to the other kinds of uh connections, but the definitions of so-called biodefense versus biowarfare are completely, completely arbitrary and fluid, it seems to me, because you can have a biodefense program working on the same pathogens.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they you can have gain of function research with the same pathogens, uh, but you say, oh, but we just want to make sure if someone else does something bad, uh, we have a cure or we know what it's gonna do.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's exactly the same thing in practice, uh, whether it's labeled as a defensive measure, which is allowed under the treaty, or whether it is a warfare measure, which is presumptively prohibited under the treaty.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's no teeth to it, if if I understand correctly.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Not only is there no teeth, but I think it really ends up building paranoia.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Paranoia is one of the major themes in the book I just wrote, because this idea that you shouldn't trust someone is so contagious.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: So as you say, well, you have scientists around the world saying, well, we better build this really nefarious dark weapon that can defeat this and that, and because the other side is probably doing it.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then you're encouraging this kind of thinking where people are pushing the most extreme idea of the weapon you could create to the fore, and then potentially creating laboratory conditions to test and see if you can build a countermeasure against that, which is almost impossible.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you saw a uh uh in a few days ago uh uh a release of a section of uh Tony Fauci's uh diary uh about uh an experiment in 2015 at USAMRID uh about uh aerosolizing Ebola.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh did you did you sure did?
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Sure did, yes.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh just to uh uh uh bring everybody into the discussion, um maybe you could explain what USAMRIT is, and if if I'm pronouncing it correctly, I've never been there, uh, but uh I've uh watched it from a distance for a long time.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well it's at Fort Dietrich, and you know I was invited there two weeks ago to go do a QA with staff at the BSL 4 lab.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really remarkable, like through four security checkpoints with armed guards to get into that situation.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, but I have to and that by the way, that at USAMRIT, um, so there's in Fort Dietrich, that's the military facility in Maryland that you're referring to.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the Pentagon's BSL for lab is called USAMRIT, which is which stands for the U.S.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: Army, their institute, so it's the only Defense Department BSL for lab in the country.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: What they also have there is another BSL for lab that is run by DHS that has to do with homeland defense.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's where I was invited.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: But you're absolutely right that there was this release of Fauci's journal where he revealed to the world and you know, most people Well, he revealed to his diary.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, but but the excerpt Was then revealed to the world.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: Let's uh let's say Fauci was not revealing it to the world at the time.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: He was actually trying to keep it secret, which I don't think.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this, but you know, I mean, we are both chuckling here, and it is actually very tragic that this uh what happened with COVID, the idea that a pandemic is no longer theoretical.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like this could be such a wonderful experience to learn from about how to deal with future pandemics, about how to look at biological weapons treaties, about how to look at this dangerous, risky research.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: And as not just a society here in the West, but essentially the global population realizing that we cannot afford this kind of folly with weapons of mass destruction across the board.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: There are too many things that could go wrong for all of us.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: I want to come back to the lessons of COVID, but but I want to talk about your scenario first uh so that people understand uh what could happen, because that's uh uh that that is uh the the essence of it.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but uh uh just uh before getting there, I I did want to point out uh this absolute uh uh the absolute reality that we have a treaty that in principle stops biological warfare, but it doesn't stop uh necessarily any of the research that is uh targeted in uh in that uh uh in in that convention, because you just call it defense rather than warfare, and uh the treaty gives a free pass to it.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the case that I was mentioning uh was Ebola, uh obviously one of the uh truly lethal pathogens, and we've been hit by what are presumably natural uh epidemics, uh including one that is going on right now in Africa.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: But uh in 2015, in the context perhaps of the African uh epidemic which occurred around that time or not, uh they're aerosolizing uh this pathogen.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh can you explain what that means uh to everybody just to understand?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because Fauci, who was, as I think everyone will know, and at least in the United States, he was in charge for decades uh of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease, and he was assigned from 2001 onward the oversight of the so-called biodefense research program of the Defense Department, uh, which put a lot of its functionality through the National Institutes of Health and through Fauci's division.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and in 2015, uh, according to his diary, he's shocked to learn, oh my God, they're aerosolizing Ebola.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then he runs and he uh mentions a word that I never heard of, but then came across uh in your book uh a number of times, and now I forget it.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: He says, I have to go to this uh facility, uh communicating secure communications facility.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't remember the question.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: What's it called?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's called a SKIF.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: A SCIF.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: So he says, Oh my God, I have to go to a SCIF to talk to the National Security Council.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: What are these idiots doing, uh basically, to uh paraphrase it?
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: But it was kept secret uh until uh last week that they were busy at uh USAMRID aerosolizing Ebola.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: And if you could just mention what that means, and then I want to turn to the scenario.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: So Ebola in the wild, natural Mother Nature's Ebola, like we're seeing in West Africa right now, while its case fatality rate is extraordinary.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, 70, 80, 95% of the people that get it die.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: They die a horrible death.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's a hemorrhagic fever, they bleed to death, they bleed out their eyes and ears.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's just horrific.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: However, it is not airborne.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: COVID was airborne.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: It is not airborne, you cannot catch it talking to one another across a room.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that is why you see so many of the first responders, the doctors, the nurses, the loved ones holding their sick children.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: They will likely get Ebola because Ebola is droplet transmission.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: If you breed on someone, transmitted by droplets, yeah.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so what prevents Ebola from becoming a pandemic and instead keeps it this horrific epidemic is the fact that it is not airborne.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: And what those experiments were doing at USAMRIT, which shocked me, is that the United States government was aerosolizing Ebola, allegedly so that it could determine how what kind of an impact that would have on newly emerging, developing vaccines for Ebola, which still haven't really been widely available.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna say maybe that's the perfect.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's such a bad idea.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason it's a bad idea, on top of the fact that it stands in the face of the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty, is also that the lab leak possibility is n is not just a possibility, it's a plausibility.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: You saw that you see that time and time again.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: Accidents happen.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's why all subject matter experts told me the lab leak is so dangerous, and it's why it is the inciting incident in the book I write, a lab accident.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Let's turn to this scenario and uh explain to people what a uh genetically modified killer pathogen that uh either by target or accident escapes from a laboratory could mean in this world.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in nuclear war, I took readers from nuclear launch to nuclear winter in 72 minutes, because that's how long it takes.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was in a cold sweat by the time I finished your book, which I think was the point, but I literally was terrified by it in the reading.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: No, it was uh you I I say thank you to you, but it was so riveting and so uh so gripping because it was the minute to minute, second to second from a launch to the end of humanity, um told brilliantly.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: And now we start in this case with the well, tell us what happens.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: So in this book, Biological War Scenario, I take the readers from outbreak to anarchy in six days.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: And on day six, the insurrection act is laid down in the United States.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: But the reason why this happens in days is because the pathogen that leaks out or rather is accidentally released out of the BSL 4 lab in Siberia is pneumonic plague, and it has been genetically modified for greater transmissibility and virulence.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's also been genetically modified to defeat medical countermeasures, i.e.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: antibiotics.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is not from Annie Jacobson's imagination.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: These are science facts based on interviews I did with former USAMRID scientists who were the world's experts on plague.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: Plague is considered a tier one select agent on the CDC's list.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: It is a as a biological weapon, it is what the Pentagon, the CDC, HHS, FEMA, DHS, all the Principles Committee for the President who deal with this issue.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: It is what they are most afraid of.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: And just to explain to people, because they may have heard the word plague and think plague means uh an epidemic or a pandemic, but plague is a specific disease, a specific pathogen.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: Eurysynia pestis.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it was presumably the pathogen that caused the Black Death in Europe, claiming uh about a third of Europe's population between 1347 and 1351.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: It was not out of a lab then.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it was uh carried uh presumably from Central Asia by rodents, uh by uh Genoese uh ships and uh merchants, uh, but it was a devastating plague, and it was another plague.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in Rome right now uh on top of uh uh Hadrian's tomb, it's called, or uh Castel San Angelo, uh, which is a mausoleum for Emperor Hadrian.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there is a statue, uh a sculpture of the uh archangel Michael, uh and uh it was put originally, uh not the current uh sculpture that's there, but the original one was put there around 590 A.D.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: because uh it was the Pope uh said that the archangel uh had brought control to uh a Yersinia pestis, that is a plague epidemic that ravaged Rome called Justinian's plague.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: It started uh decades earlier than that.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um but uh so plague has been with humanity, it's a specific disease, not just the category of uh of an epidemic or pandemic, because we use it the word in that way, but it's very specific.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: And you're talking about uh a genetically modified plague.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, plague is so generic in essence that it's now become a noun.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's so deadly.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: But your bubonic plague is the pr usually the primary force.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's caused by you're bitten by a flea and your bubose gets infected, and then you have s pneumonic plague, pneumonia meaning the lungs, is what happens when plague enters into the lungs, and then it becomes 100% death if you're not treated immediately by antibiotics.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say immediately, I mean within 24 hours.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: But we know from the Soviet defector scientists that what they were working on during the Cold War, and this is actually in the 80s, when they had signed the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty, kind of crossed their fingers behind their back, signed it, and then immediately embarked on this very nefarious biological weapons program.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the major pathogens they used was Uersinia pestis plague.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: They were developing a super plague weapon with mnemonic plague because of that profoundly high case fatality rate to infect the lungs and to kill people.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the pathogen that I use in the scenario I write.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: But even more specific because the USAMRA doctors told me something that had not ever been reported before, which was the Soviet scientists were working, and this is back 40 years ago when genetic modifications were in their infancy.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: Think about what we have now with CRISPR, what you can do.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: But back in the 80s, they were working to insert the gene for euphoria into the front end of the pathogen.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you might say, what on earth would that do?
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, when someone has pneumonic plague, um, they are so incredibly sick, they are almost certainly at home under the covers, coughing up blood and then dying very quickly, i.e., not infecting many other people.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: But if you insert that gene for euphoria, you're going to go out and socialize because you think you feel great.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: And when the Eusamarid scientist told me that, it's just so dark.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't possibly create anything more nor more nefarious.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how the scenario begins.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why the days move so quickly from one to six.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because we all fly on airplanes.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: It is just possible to get halfway across the world in less than a day.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the the book indeed starts uh at a disco uh with a euphoric infected uh person who will soon die, but dancing uh the night away and infecting everyone else uh in uh in the disco that night and getting on an airplane and uh spreading uh the disease, as we learned from COVID, which uh quickly became a global uh disease, uh, even though there are lots of issues uh about its uh origins, and I want to come back to that in a moment, but uh it spread worldwide, and that is a lesson of our interconnected world and how fast the disease spreads.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but um why not just uh treat people with antibiotics?
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh this is a curable disease and get on with it.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: From the Soviet defector scientists, we also learned that they were working to engineer something in the back end of the pathogen, and that was not only its ability to defeat medical countermeasures, antibiotics, which most people believe they can take, and you certainly can if you have a Mother Nature's plague, to lower that case fatality down into the single or double digits.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: But instead, the Soviet scientists were working to insert another gene in the back end so that when you took the antibiotics, it would trigger an even equally horrific another disease called equine encephalitis.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so the reason behind that, they said, was they wanted you they wanted people in the West their last dying thought as they're about to die from equine encephalitis, which is like a brain disease, your brain almost explodes.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: The last thought would hopefully be, oh my God, my government and Western medical science has failed me.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's so paranoid and dark, and it makes perfect sense.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the scenario that I unfold in the United States.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: One of the other things that was profoundly interesting to me was learning from Homeland Security, learning from Pentagon officials that essentially if this kind of a pathogen landed on U.S.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: soil, there is this was a quote from Tom Earhart, a retired colonel who used to run these war game scenarios at the Pentagon.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, in the event of a biological catastrophe like the one I describe, there's nothing you can do to defend against it, only to mitigate extermination.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: Explain what happens uh in your scenario, uh why all hell breaks loose, uh as it were.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean uh this uh genetically modified uh plague uh spreads very rapidly.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh what is the reality uh that uh people face uh suddenly because they all try to get uh the uh the the antibiotic within twenty-four hours.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's uh of course uh uh not going to work uh uh as uh as desired, but people are desperately uh trying to find some some care as the death toll mounts very fast.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: Very quickly.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I was surprised to learn that not not just the Pentagon, but also pandemic planners from CDC to HHS all know that fear of infection is what fuels the chaos.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you think about it personally, it's one thing if you know bullets are flying at you or bombs are dropping.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: You can essentially figure out maybe how to get out of the line of fire.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: But with a pathogen, it's so evil because you have no way of knowing if you have even been infected.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so this panic takes over.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: Every war game I looked at, every unclassified pandemic planning game, which you can look up online, you notice that they all abruptly end at a certain point when anarchy begins to spread across the United States because they can't control it.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so that as an investigative journalist was incredibly interesting to me to learn that yes, all those war games end sort of when anarchy takes over, but they only end because the government knows what happens and doesn't necessarily want to share it.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that was the part of the I I was gonna ask you, what is uh what was the same and uh what was different from your scenario and uh and COVID, in fact, because that was a rapidly spreading pandemic.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh I think my my own feeling is uh it was a lab-created virus, but we'll come back to that.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: There still is uncertainty about that.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: But in any event, what what is the difference of the dynamics uh in in your scenario?
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think that's important for people to understand also.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: COVID had a 1% or less case fatality rate.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: Out of 100 people, one or less died.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: Pneumonic plague has a case fatality rate of 100%.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: That is the difference.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: And in any of these pandemic planning scenarios, if you have a case fatality rate of even 10 or 12%, predictions are that chaos will take over.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: But there's such an extraordinary difference between 1% and 100%.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that is really why, as I mentioned earlier, mneumonic plague sits right up there as the Tier 1 select agent top fear that it could be used as a biological weapon.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I think that's very important to understand.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: We had a massive pandemic.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it is debated how many people succumbed to COVID, but um the kind of official tally worldwide was about seven million.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_01: The modeled estimate uh which says that many deaths from COVID were not counted as such, uh, is around twenty million.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's huge, but uh as you say, uh uh uh it is still uh uh uh not uh what you are depicting because uh with a it it is a much lower uh fatality rate in the in a world of eight billion people.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh one percent of uh uh humanity is uh eighty million people, and uh the deaths may have been a quarter of one percent horrific.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it paralyzed uh the world economy.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we were uh all subjected to a lot of fear and a lot of uh lockdowns and and uh it was uh uh a massive, massive impact.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: But you're talking about the fact that with uh biological warfare purposes we could have pathogens much more lethal uh than SARS-CoV-2, which was the pathogen that uh caused the the COVID epidemic.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also gonna give you an anecdote because I just think this is fascinating to consider, and it has to do with uncertainty.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: So when the COVID pandemic was taking over the world, you had the WHO and the CDC tweeting out COVID not airborne.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: For a full three months, I reprint a copy of this tweet in the book because it's almost impossible to remember.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: COVID was airborne.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: So the world's governing bodies that are supposed to be the public health officials that are supposed to be overlooking all this didn't even know if it was airborne.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: Was it nefarious?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: Probably not.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was uncertainty.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: But they still haven't come out and said, look, we're really sorry we were wrong.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, you had this pushing idea that COVID could be transmitted from a surface.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember wearing gloves and everyone having lysol?
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the supply chain ran out of Lysol.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: And as it turns out, one in 10,000 cases of COVID was transmitted from what's called fomite transmission from a surface.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it was airborne all along.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it just I think what it speaks to is this uncertainty about pathogens.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is these are pathogens that allegedly come from Mother Nature.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so once you put genetic modifications into the mix, now you're getting a situation where if the WHO can't even understand a pathogen, a pandemic as it's unfolding that is allegedly coming from Mother Nature, how are they possibly going to be able to convey correct information with a new or novel situation?
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: I was um chairman of a commission about COVID in real time uh for the Lancet Medical Journal.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm an economist, as you know, but um spent a lot of time on the economics of public health and uh worked with WHO twenty six years ago, uh uh heading a major commission for the World Health Organization called the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I helped to design the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and malaria and uh the U.S.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: programs on malaria control in Africa and so forth.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I've been involved in these issues for a long time, so I became uh chair of this commission.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um I uh have two observations.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: One is uh I reached the conclusion that uh this was most likely, though not certainly, but most likely uh a lab-created pathogen, because uh the agency that you know well, DARPA, had uh received a proposal actually in uh 2018 to modify a beta coronavirus, uh which is the causative pathogen of COVID, uh, and to modify it in a way that showed up in the actual COVID pandemic, uh.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: That is to put in a specific sequence called a Furin Cleavage site.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: And they said that's what we want to do.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: And DARPA said, well, we didn't pay for that, but uh uh one of the lead U.S.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: AMR uh USAMRID scientists said to me, I have reason to believe they did it even without the DARPA funding.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh an American scientist uh named uh Ralph Barrick at University of North Carolina.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: I have my suspicions uh about all of that and the ways that uh this was was done.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: But the other observation I make about uh COVID is uh every one of our lives was massively disrupted for at least two years, and in some ways for three years, and some ways uh even beyond that.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_01: But we don't seem to draw many lessons from it.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_01: Can you explain that?
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: I don't get it.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm as baffled as you are, and your work on all of that was incredible, and of course, you are a subject matter expert on this.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I, like so many I know, remain baffled that COVID is not looked into more seriously as an objective cautionary tale for all of us, and instead it's verily obvious that it is now simply divided on tribal lines.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so what happens is people say, oh, it's more important that my side is right, so I'm not going to ask more questions about that.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: That is doing so at your own peril.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't it amazing though?
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: Because to me, you know, one one of the uh interesting things for me, there there are a thousand interesting things for me and baffling things for me, but uh there was excellent modeling during COVID of trying to understand the dynamics because our lives depended on it.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: And this is where this difference of seven million deaths and twenty million deaths came from was uh the underlying epidemiological modeling.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: But as soon as uh the epidemic waned, even those projects just stopped with no attempt afterwards to say, well, did the lockdowns work or not work?
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_01: No, we hated them.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_01: That was uh whatever.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we're against them, we're in favor of them, tribal, but not actually saying, well, our lives were disrupted, it was profoundly dangerous.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: Let's figure out what just happened.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: We don't do that.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: And your book is uh, again, a hugely important call.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: Think, for God's sake, can we think?
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think the only thing one can do in this situation is try to lead by example.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: I really work very hard to be nonpartisan.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's why I have so many sources on both sides of the aisle.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_00: People will talk to me from every political spectrum.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: This is so important.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's very important.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_00: And also you have to be flexible.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this has to do with, you know, one's personal life when you're a mom.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, uh, if I am wrong, I need to stand corrected.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it's okay to be wrong because it probably means you're pushing your intellectual capacity further than, you know, just being comfortable in the certain zone of what you think you know.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I find more than anything that it's pretty clear that the people who insist on, you know, for example, the the the wet lab uh or sorry, the Wuhan wet market idea, they just all have a very serious horse in the race.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: They were either paid, are being paid, or they benefited somehow from having that narrative.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I I really sort of pity if that is the mindset, because I think it really restricts you evolving in your own life of what you want to do next and how you want to present yourself.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: To tell you the most practical point about this, we don't know where that virus came from.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: There are suspicions that it uh came from uh University of North Carolina, there are suspicions that it was natural.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: But what I've been saying for uh five years is well, let's look at the lab books of UNC.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: Let's look at the lab books of Rocky Mountain Lab.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: And because of this tribalism or desire to protect people or to not find out for whatever reason, we don't even get to that stage of just doing the most basic fact-finding.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's hidden.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_00: Jeff, here's what I have to say, having written my six previous books, Before the Scenarios, are about old historical programs from the Cold War, and I can tell you that stuff always gets revealed.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_00: So you can think you're hiding something, but guess what?
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: Some intrepid journalist is gonna come along.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_00: I was able to declassify records on Nazi scientists with the help of Harvard University that had been classified for 60 years.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it made clear.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: X, Y, and Z were known to be Nazi war criminals, and we hired them anyway.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so the point of that is that the individuals who are protecting their legacy and whatnot, you know, over time it all gets revealed.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, your point that there are 3,600 BSL III facilities.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: So people should understand BSL is biosafety level three.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's the level of care to protect against a pathogen release and BSL-4 even higher, uh with the spacesuits and the negative pressure uh zones and all the rest, 110 of them around the world.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: And for people to understand how out of control such a number is in our advanced biotechnology age, one of the things that struck me most remarkably about the COVID period was that around 2022, suddenly Boston University announced, well, we've uh made uh uh an enhanced version of SARS-CoV-2, of one of the uh variants of SARS-CoV-2.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my God, they did a gain-of-function experiment.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: And NIH said publicly, wait a minute, you didn't ask for permission to do that.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: How are you doing that?
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: This was one of hundreds of labs around uh the world or thousands.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh Boston University uh spokesman said, we don't have to ask permission.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't on your tab, it was on our budget.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my God, it shows how completely out of control this, in fact, is right now.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't even have to be a government lab.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: It can be a university lab, it can be a private business, it can be a madman from a kind of uh James Bond movie uh that wants to make a uh a pathogen to release to the world and blackmail the world.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this speaks to our opening conversation about that low barrier for entry.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine trying to make a nuclear weapon in an academic setting at a university like Boston University.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you would get a visit from the FBI so fast and you would be in prison for a very long time.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what's also interesting is there are some requirements with, you know, with certain pathogens, if you try and acquire smallpox, you are facing 25 years in a federal prison and a$2 million fine.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_00: So if that's the case with smallpox, why isn't it the case with the regulations of all these other pathogens that could be turned into biological weapons?
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: It should be.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think if anything that we're having right now is a conversation about all of that, that's actually a positive motion.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: And and Annie, you know, people should understand something that uh was it's basic, but it was shocking to me.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, people know the genetic code is uh a bunch of letters, uh four main letters for a DNA uh based virus and uh four w with one different letter for an RNA virus.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_01: And what the scientists can do right now is if you give them, for example, the 30,000 letters in sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 that caused COVID, they can make a live virus from that.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, you give them the the alphabet soup, not a virus, not a biological uh entity, but they'll make the virus.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_01: You can construct that pretty routinely now.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the ability to build a virus, even de novo, is there.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: And this is in thousands of labs around the world.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I write in the acknowledgments of my book the point is not panic, the point is pressure.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: But maybe a little dose of pan healthy panic would be wise to actually encourage pressure.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: Annie, I I spoke uh a couple of weeks ago with the head of the World Health Organization, and um we talked about the uh World Health Assembly, uh, which is the uh place where the world's health ministers meet together next spring.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and I said I was gonna write up some notes for an agenda, and I'm going to refer to your book on that, uh, as I always do with your writing, to say that we absolutely need to get this technology under global scrutiny and global control, this freelancing, or they're doing it, so we're gonna do it, or they do warfare, we do biodefense.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: None of this is gonna work uh right now.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the absolute explosion of capability, not to mention, as you said, the AI-empowered design of pathogens.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_01: All of this means that you've written another masterpiece of uh absolute urgency.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we're going to uh I'm gonna help take this message uh forward uh again.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: It builds also on the work that I did with COVID, but I think we have an opportunity to put this urgently in front of the world leaders.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: Sadly, our our government in the United States has departed WHO.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_01: It says they don't want control.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it has rejected participation in global treaties on this, but I think with pressure and awareness of uh the world's public, uh every government will have to participate.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: Couldn't agree further.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna do that.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Annie, we've uh uh come so fast uh to uh uh the end of uh a riveting hour together with you.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's a lot more to discuss, so we're gonna continue our conversation uh when we have a chance soon.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: But uh for all the listeners, we've been listening to uh Annie Jacobson uh producing another remarkably powerful, remarkably important book, uh Biological War Scenario.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh this is a companion to the absolutely this one's terrifying, and it's a companion to the rightly terrifying nuclear war scenario uh of uh 2024.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um please uh get this book, read it, think about the 3,600 laboratories that are working with dangerous pathogens right now and the lack of global control and the urgency, the absolute urgency that we bring this under control.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: And when you do think about it, listeners, uh, thank uh Annie Jacobson for her remarkable work.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: Annie, thank you so much for being with me again on Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for having me.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: Great to be with you.