Annie Jacobsen’s new book imagines a laboratory accident unleashing a weaponised plague across the world. Recent events in Siberia make its fictional scenario feel uncomfortably close to reality.
A few months ago, I ordered a pre-publication copy of Annie Jacobsen’s new non-fiction book, Biological War: A Scenario, which followed her excellent book, Nuclear War: A Scenario – not because I enjoy reading about existential risks – but because I’m an information-seeker and feel that it’s important to stay informed. But when it arrived a few weeks later, in spite of having written an earlier opinion piece for P&I, entitled ‘Why we avoid thinking about nuclear war – and why we shouldn’t‘, after seeing the frightening cover illustration of men in hazmat suits on Jacobsen’s book, I stashed it on the bookshelf rather than reading it – for the same reasons I discussed in my earlier piece: I didn’t want to know!
After the reports of a biolab accident in Russia, I retrieved it from the bookshelf and read it in two days. The ‘scenario’ in the book is that of a ‘biological weapons lab accident’ where a scientist working to modify pneumonic plague into a deadly biological weapon experiences remorse and tries to destroy it. But the small fire he lights causes an explosion that propels the Yersinia pestis bacteria (which causes the plague) into the atmosphere. In the process, he becomes infected with his weaponised pneumonic plague, although he doesn’t yet know it.
The next morning, he goes to an Orthodox church to confess where, by coughing in the midst of confession, he infects the priest, as well as the person behind him – a pre-med foreign exchange student, who is back in this small Russian town visiting family before returning to the US shortly thereafter, where he is studying and doing volunteer work with homeless people. The student subsequently infects scores of people on Skid Row, who, in turn, infect the first responders who come to help them and, ultimately, the whole city of Los Angeles.
Following his confession, the scientist goes into the woods to shoot himself but collapses from the symptoms of plague. He is found by men on an international hunting trip, who administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and carry him back to their hunting lodge, where he is collected by officials. After dining together, using the same sauna and steam bath, and driving to the airport in a small van, seven of the hunters board flights to six of the world’s seven continents, while another goes off on a sea cruise – spreading pneumonic plague on their flights and sea voyage – and ultimately around the world.
In a real-world scenario, reported on 2 October, Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old laboratory technician working in an ‘Anti-Plague Institute’ in Irkutsk, Siberia, died, according to Russian officials, of “a pneumonia of unknown etiology“. A Russian news agency reported that she had broken a test tube containing live bacteria of the pneumonic plague pathogen – leading to widespread speculation that she had, indeed, died of pneumonic plague.
These concerns were reinforced by reports that Russian health authorities had imposed sweeping quarantine restrictions on the lab where Shipilova worked, the hospital where she died and other nearby hospitals. Neighbours also reported that workers in protective suits and gas masks repeatedly disinfected the building where she lived, telling residents that it was “for cockroaches”, although the building has no cockroaches. More recently, Russia’s health agency asserted that the plague was not detected in follow-up tests of “thousands of people in the region”.
The overall opacity of the response (a familiar playbook for crises in Russia) by Russian public health officials to urgent requests for more information from the World Health Organization, the EU, the US and other governments led to considerable disquiet around the world, including in Australia.
When asked if her death was related to a bioweapon, Trump responded, not very reassuringly, “We don’t think so.” He also acknowledged the similarities in how Chinese officials handled COVID-19 before it became a global pandemic. “China didn’t say much, and Russia is not saying much either.”
The latter part of Jacobsen’s book deals with the breakdown of law and order, as mass death and panic take hold and cause chaos. Ultimately, the US president deploys the Insurrection Act, whereby military forces attempt to establish martial law for the first time in American history. Just as they are about to release the strategic national stockpiles of medicine, scientists at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease receive their first bacterial specimens (from the infected hunter who landed in Dallas and died in a local hospital). Microbiologists in biocontainment suits examine the specimens and plague cultures are grown and used to test for antibiotic resistance in small animals. Simultaneously, microbiologists extract DNA from the specimen and feed it into a high-speed sequencing machine to get a genetic fingerprint of the pathogen.
What they discover is appalling – the organism has been bioengineered and “looks alarmingly like a twenty-first century version of something Russian scientists worked on during the Soviet-era secret biological weapons programs”. It is a combination of two pathogens, one concealed within another, referred to as a ‘booby-trap bio-weapon’, whereby, after a person becomes infected with pneumonic plague and takes antibiotics as soon as possible on the assumption they will be cured, the antibiotics trigger the chimera weapon’s booby-trap mechanism – in this fictional case, the Venezuelan equine encephalitis gene, which has been covertly spliced into the Yersinia pestis genome to cause acute neurological symptoms and death. As a result, there is no cure.
Although the real-life situation in Siberia will hopefully not turn out to be the same as in Annie Jacobsen’s book, it should cause us to sit up and take notice.
Part two will discuss why we should be worried, including the weakness of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) created in 1972 and how it could be strengthened. It will also examine how the Soviet Union violated the BWC during the Cold War and consider whether the Russian Federation is still doing that today, which is the premise upon which Jacobsen’s book is based.
As Jacobsen concludes, her message “is not meant to create unnecessary fear. It is meant to make clear what is now possible, and what is at stake. The tools to engineer life are advancing faster than the rules that govern them. This gap is where existential danger lives. The point is not panic; the point is pressure. To demand guardrails, oversight, and accountability before the science outruns our ability to control it. Before we set something irreversible in motion.”
Connie Peck
Dr. Connie Peck, AO, is the Founder/Former Principal Coordinator of the UNITAR Programme in Peacemaking and Conflict Prevention – the first-ever training programme in negotiation and mediation in the United Nations (now in its 33rd year). When lecturing at La Trobe University in the 1980s, she also founded Psychologists for the Prevention of War (now called Psychologists for Peace) during the height of the Cold War and acted as its first Convenor. She is the author of several books and numerous articles on conflict resolution and the nuclear threat.See also: www.linkedin.com/in/connie-peck-b92a403a0