Biological war can begin with an accident, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War):
A large-scale attack with a biological weapon can set off a pandemic, but so can a lab leak.
“The risk of a pandemic from a lab escape is not hypothetical,” Andy Weber tells us. He’s one of a small number of U.S. officials to have ever visited the Vector Institute, which he did in the 1990s. Weber has firsthand knowledge of the germs stored inside the freezers at Vector, many of which have been weaponized to kill population sets in the most diabolical of ways.
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“We have eyes on all critical facilities,” retired colonel Julian Chesnutt, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, tells us, “near continuous coverage of all ‘facilities of interest’ across the globe.”
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Airborne killers like plague, smallpox, and genetically modified flu will have a high transmission rate, high fear factor, and potential global impact. Fluid-contact killers like Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa fever will have a lower rate of spread, but similarly high lethality and panic components. Environmentally persistent spores like anthrax will mean limited, person-to-person spread, but long-term contamination and psychological issues.
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“If you can deal with a lab leak in the first twelve to twenty-four hours, the outcome can be drastically different,” Dr. Robert Kadlec tells us. Kadlec, a retired air force physician, is a long-serving presidential advisor on bioterrorism. During the Covid pandemic, he was a primary driver of Operation Warp Speed, the government-led effort that developed, manufactured, and distributed 977 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine across the United States.
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If a deadly pathogen has been accidently released, sharing information—or even asking for help—makes containment far more likely. Containment of an infected population through quarantine, contact tracing, and other measures allows public health officials to stop a pandemic in its tracks. “Koltsovo is not Beijing,” Dr. Cameron says of this [fictional] scenario, meaning quarantining Koltsovo’s 20,000 residents would be possible, whereas quarantining a city like Beijing, with a population of 22 million, would never work. But Dr. Cameron’s comments also allude to a much greater existential threat. One that hangs like a sword of Damocles over all of us. Many of today’s BSL-4 labs have been built in or near cities with millions of people.
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Because all biological weapons programs are illegal, all biological weapons programs are clandestine, or disguised as vaccine or other kinds of research.