Plague has been responsible for several of the most fatal pandemics in human history, Annie Jacobsen notes (in Biological War), including ones in the sixth, fourteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries:
From around 1347 to 1352, the disease killed 150 million people.
Then she explains that her nightmare scenario involves a modified plague:
This particular plague weapon has been genetically engineered to initially deliver a neurochemical high.
“When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague,” says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, “we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way… to make you want to go out and socialize… this was some horrifying stuff.”
Y. pestis is shorthand for Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, and Dr. Heine is one of the world’s subject-matter experts. Starting in the late 1990s, he spent eleven years working on biological warfare countermeasures at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Fort Detrick, Maryland. USAMRIID, or “you-sam-rid” as it’s known, is the Defense Department’s flagship center for high-and maximum-containment infectious disease research and its only Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory. In the event of a biological attack against America, USAMRIID scientists will be at the fore.
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Former assistant secretary of defense Andy Weber agrees. “I grew up thinking Reagan’s phrase ‘Evil Empire’ was an exaggeration,” he tells us. “Then I learned what the Russians were doing [with biological warfare].” He pauses for effect. “It was evil.”
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“Because of the severity of the disease, the rapid onset of symptoms, sepsis, and multi-organ system failure followed by 100% mortality in untreated patients,” retired colonel Bret Purcell, the former chief of the Division of Medicine at USAMRIID, tells us, “the U.S. military recognizes Yersinia pestis [as] one of the highest bacterial threat pathogens to our military and civilian populations.”
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During Dr. Heine’s tenure at USAMRIID, he spent thousands of hours inside a laboratory studying plague. His efforts, which focused on developing therapeutics against biowarfare and bioterrorism, included work to develop a plague vaccine. It never advanced beyond animal trials. “You can’t defend against every imaginable thing,” Heine laments, citing the undeniable reality at the center of the military’s efforts to defend against biological warfare. Biological warfare is, at its core, indefensible.
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People whose lungs are infected with Yersinia pestis generally begin developing symptoms after an incubation period of between one and three days, depending on an array of factors, from the strength of their immune system, to the dosage they receive. Genetic modifications can further alter this time frame.
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Pneumonic plague is a fulminant disease, meaning it strikes fast and kills quickly.