1367: Annie Jacobsen | The Genes and Germs of Biological Warfare

1367: Annie Jacobsen | The Genes and Germs of Biological Warfare

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Annie Jacobsen: The revelation is the Soviet program was not dismantled when the wall went down, but rather absorbed. They sign the treaty. They cross their fingers, their hands behind their back and say, "Oh yeah, we're definitely on board. No biological weapons." And what do they do?

They begin a colossal illegal biological weapons program involving genetic modifications. And among the weapons was the super plague weapon that was designed to kill tens of millions or hundreds of millions of their enemies in the West.

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Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today's guest asks us to imagine an American walking into a packed Frankfurt nightclub with degree fever. He should feel like death. Instead, he feels euphoric because the plague multiplying in his lungs has been genetically engineered to make him want to socialize.

He dances until dawn, then he boards a flight to Dallas with four hundred plus other people. Annie Jacobsen's new book is not about a bomb that explodes once. It's about a living weapon that copies itself, travels through our airports, exploits our compassion, [00:02:00] and attacks not only our bodies, but our trust in medicine, the government, and in one another.

How much of this nightmare is documented history? How much of it is plausible extrapolation? And what can be done before the clock runs out? Here we go with Annie Jacobsen. This book is actually quite scary. Nuclear War was scary because everybody dies, but this is scarier because everybody dies, but also way more gruesomely and it takes longer.

Annie Jacobsen: You know, Nuclear War is, in that book I take the readers from nuclear launch to nuclear winter in 72 minutes. In this book, I take the readers from outbreak to anarchy in six days. So it seems like a long time, relatively speaking, but that's super fast. But as you learn, what happens after day six is really distressing.

Jordan Harbinger: That's the scariest part. Look, dying of a horrible disease is pretty bad, but watching all of your friends and family get dragged into the street and killed because you have creamed corn in your basement is s- scarier somehow. Like with Nuclear War, you just go, [00:03:00] "I want to be one of the first people to die, not one of the last people to die."

Annie Jacobsen: I haven't thought about creamed corn in a while. Yeah. But now I'm not going to be able to get that visual- Yeah ... out of my head.

Jordan Harbinger: So take us into that Frankfurt nightclub. There's an American, he's on the dance floor, he's got a little bit of a fever. Guy should be home in bed, but he feels great. So what has been done to this pathogen, and why might this euphoria be one of its most diabolical features?

Annie Jacobsen: Yes. For spoiler alert, the, the prologue of the book begins a couple days into the scenario. Mm-hmm. The scenario begins with an accident and a lab leak. But the prologue shows us what happens, that terrifying process of transmission, of infecting other people, of a super spreader event. And specifically, you're asking about why someone infected with pneumonic plague would be experiencing euphoria.

And that is one of the most [00:04:00] terrifying science facts I learned in reporting this book. Not science fiction. Sounds like science fiction. This comes directly from Dr. Henry Heine, one of the world's subject matter experts on plague, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, who told me that when he learned in, that in, during the Cold War the Soviets were genetically modifying plague, and this is mind you decades ago, when genetic modification was in, like, the first stages.

They were modifying it with, by inserting a gene for euphoria. And he talks about how sinister and how malevolent this is. And the reason is very simple. Has to do with transmission.

has to do with how many people you affect. If you are sick with something like plague, really any sort of respiratory illness, you're going to be home in bed under the covers not infecting other [00:05:00] people. And the idea that the Soviets had was insert a gene for euphoria because it makes you want to go be social.

Jordan Harbinger: And be around a bunch of other people, and therefore contaminate or infect them.

Annie Jacobsen: Be in a disco disco dancing and breathing on other people, and that is precisely what happens in that infection phase of the scenario.

Jordan Harbinger: I want to go through this man's journey. Take us from the nightclub to he- the hotel shower to the airport, and he's on whatever, seat 8A on a flight that has 400 people on it probably also. At, at, at what point does stopping a disease like this become nearly impossible? Because it's probably even earlier than that.

Annie Jacobsen: Yes. Yes, at this point, stopping a disease is impossible. And of course, the premise of, you know, stopping a biological catastrophe is making sure that an outbreak is mitigated, that you can... If you can move right in, whether or not you're public health officials, you're the military, whatever organization that could take [00:06:00] action, time is of the essence when you have a lab leak, when you have the disbursement of a genetically modified pathogen.

And if all hands are on deck and you can keep that outbreak localized, you can prevent it from becoming an epidemic or becoming a pandemic. But in the case of an airborne pathogen as pneumonic plague is, pneumonia is of course pneumonic pneumonia, um, as COVID was, by the way, airborne, we can talk about what that really means, being airborne, then you have a situation where it's almost impossible to control

Jordan Harbinger: I remember early in COVID, I studied Chinese online with a Chinese teacher, and they're live and they're in China.

And I remember she was like, "Everyone here is really sick, and it's getting worse." And I said, "Oh, well, it can't be that bad if you haven't seen it on the news." And then I remembered that they control the media in China, right? Wow. He missed last words. And then she got really sick, and then I had a substitute, and that substitute got sick.

And then I was like, "Geez, this is [00:07:00] probably going to make it over here." And then I think it was February, and I thought maybe we dodged it because it's been six weeks. And my parents were here visiting, and then they flew back to Michigan. And, like, two days later, it was, "Don't go outside. Everyone's getting this COVID thing.

It's like SARS." And I thought like, "Oh, too bad there was no Polymarket back then. I could have made a fortune betting that this thing was going to come to the United States because I had a, a little bit of an early warning." And I had bought masks from China through my mother-in-law. I was like, "I need, like, 2,000 masks," because everybody in China was buying masks.

And then I remember trying to reorder those masks. Impossible, because they had stopped shipping PPE out from China. So this reminds me a little bit of that, except for this is designed to be transmitted. Maybe it's... Because with COVID, I, I don't know about you, I didn't feel like going to a disco. I felt like crap.

I stayed inside and watched Netflix. This is designed to move through the populace, and COVID was maybe not that.

Annie Jacobsen: That's right. And again, this is something that Soviet biological weapons engineers [00:08:00] were actively working on. They were designing, they were thinking through the most nefarious, most evil kind of ways in which to infect the most people.

And that is enough to really make you pause. Mm-hmm. Coupled with the idea that this was decades ago, and that is why there are such alarms inside of the Defense Department, inside of HHS, CDC, inside of FEMA, which is a component of DHS. All these multiple agencies I learned in reporting and writing this book all have big red flares about the threat, and essentially very little plans about what to do to protect us.

Jordan Harbinger: That's not good news. Yeah, it is quite scary that, and DHS, Department of Homeland Security, for people who don't know. So this is a real disease that exists, or it was something they tried to make and we don't know if it exists, or it doesn't exist and was only existing on paper? Would you, do we know?

Annie Jacobsen: [00:09:00] Yeah.

Well, okay, so basic, let's start with a few basic facts for listeners because I think it's super helpful to understand that for starters, there's the concept of pathogen. Mm-hmm. So we have viruses and bacteria. COVID was a virus. Smallpox is a virus. Ebola is a virus. Bacteria, just as deadly. Anthrax is a bacteria.

Plague is a bacteria. So germs are everywhere. We have germs in our gut. It's called a pathogen when it can be deadly. And so genetic modification to a pathogen Is commonly done in biosafety labs across the country and around the world under the premise that these scientists are developing medical countermeasures.

Jordan Harbinger: That's the point, right. So we're going to develop something bad, controlled environment, develop the vaccine for it in case something similar ever happens. Because my question is, weren't the Soviets like, "Hey, if we launch this at New York, [00:10:00] it's going to be in Moscow in, like, a week." So-

Annie Jacobsen: Absolutely. Yeah. And through the lens of history, that makes perfect sense, but at the time it was a little different.

So okay, another important fact is biological weapons are illegal. Biological war is illegal. Unlike nuclear weapons, which are actually legal to the nine nuclear-armed nations that own them, they are doing everything they can to keep them out of anyone else's- Sure ... arsenals, hence Iran. But biological weapons, because of this treaty that was signed by everyone starting in 1972, everybody agreed this is odious to the conscience of mankind.

Mm-hmm. That's the kind of language that is used when discussing biological weapons, for precisely the reasons you mention. You let one off, everybody's going to get it. The concept is blowback.

Jordan Harbinger: Right, like the most sort of rogue states are the ones that are least capable of dealing with it. Like North Korea, "We don't care if everyone dies."

You know that you're all going to die because you barely have a health system. Oh, yeah, maybe we should stick with nukes.

Annie Jacobsen: This is the [00:11:00] madman theory. Yeah. Yes. So but as far as the treaty is concerned, everybody signs this treaty back in 1972. But the Soviets, by their own admittance, because a number of these scientists defected to the United States after the wall came down, they sign the treaty, they cross their fingers, their hands behind their back, and say, "Oh, yeah, we're definitely on board.

No biological weapons." And what do they do? They begin a colossal illegal biological weapons program involving genetic modifications with s- technology they stole from the Americans, good old intellectual property theft- Right ... writ large, and they were developing these weapons completely unbeknownst to the CIA or the Defense Department.

This is a known fact. It was only when a defector named Vladimir Pasechnik, just for a crisis of conscience reason, defected to the UK, and I interview in the [00:12:00] book his handler, Dr. Christopher Davis, to whom he confessed what the Soviets had been up to. And among the weapons that he was, told Davis that he was designing was the super plague weapon that was designed to kill tens of millions or hundreds of millions of their enemies in the West, to kill all the people and keep the infrastructure intact.

That was the actual idea. It's so dark. So they could just

Jordan Harbinger: come in and take the, over New York or something? Is that the idea?

Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear weapons, you're just going to have a barren wasteland- Right ... that's radioactive.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

Annie Jacobsen: Biological weapons, march in and you're good to go. That was the idea, the fantasy.

Jordan Harbinger: The, the fantasy, right?

Because what's more likely to happen is you kill hundreds of millions of people, and whoops, we have a terrible healthcare system over here, and a bunch of our people died, too. Now you have St. Petersburg, which has the infrastructure intact and no people in it. Great, mission accomplished, guys. I don't really understand [00:13:00] what they were thinking.

Did they think that having a, a minefield between that and us is going to stop this pathogen from spreading?

Annie Jacobsen: The minefield's a good analogy because that was a bit of their point. Now remember, when the wall was still up, when Russia was Soviet Russia, there was a Cold War mentality, but there was also a bit of a fortress.

You know, Russians couldn't just come and go as they please. Sure. And furthermore, the Russians were working on their own plague vaccine very intensely, and I look at the journals of the lead scientist in that program, a guy called Igor Domaradski, and you see the efforts that they were making in this vaccine became essentially biological warfare, Cold War 101 style, which was vaccinate your own people kill all of them.

Whether or not that would have worked-

Jordan Harbinger: Of course, I mean, look at how much we had to distribute the COVID vaccine in 2023 or 2022. This was going to happen in the [00:14:00] '70s and '80s? Give me a break. Sorry, folks, I don't buy it. I think this is just going to end up killing an equal number or possibly more, because again, your healthcare sys- system is not as developed.

Sure, you have a vaccine. How many doses do you have, and did your political people sell it to o- o- you know, away from... because like, look, w- 20/20 hindsight of the Soviet system, not exactly the most efficient machine for doing a lot of these things. What's happening to this guy's body when he's, thinks he has a hangover.

He probably thinks, "I don't know, I have jet lag and a cold. I can go out," right? Because he's euphoric. How easily can these symptoms be mistaken? I mean, it's not, you're not instantly going to a hospital bed. The whole point was to be fine and feel great for a while so you could spread it to a couple thousand people maybe.

Annie Jacobsen: You've brought up a wonderful point, or a horrible point, which is that so many of these deadly diseases begin to infect the body and reveal symptoms that can easily be mistaken from anything from, you know, a hangover to a [00:15:00] really bad cold. With a plague pathogen, which is actually called Yersinia pestis, you're going to have a rapid onset of symptoms much faster than usual.

But again, in the beginning, you just think, "Wow, I feel terrible."

Jordan Harbinger: Yikes. Yeah, it's scary to think that then this person's going to fly on an airplane, and I just go back to the Soviets thinking they can be immune from this. East Germany and West Germany were a stone's throw away from each other. They had plenty of cross-traffic.

There, it's not like the border between the Eastern Bloc and the West was not porous. They had diplomats. They had trade. This just doesn't seem w- like a well-thought-out plan. W- also, how difficult was it to corroborate what this defector said? Because I would imagine the former Soviet scientists didn't all come rushing to confirm what he had said when he defected to the UK.

Annie Jacobsen: Those are exact questions I asked Dr. Davis. The UK, British intelligence gathered as much information as they could from Possession Act. They were stunned, shocked, horrified, [00:16:00] and immediately shared it with their intelligence community partners in the United States, AKA the CIA. Dr. Davis himself flew to CIA with Poseshnik, sat in a room, described that to me, and then the CIA sent Joshua Lederberg, who was the Nobel laureate leading biologist at the time, they sent him to the UK to do more work with Poseshnik to really drill down on if what he was saying was legitimate.

And as he later told Congress, it all checked out, and that was a moment of, oh my God, mic drop moment.

Jordan Harbinger: Do you think they finished this thing, or did they only get 60% there and then burn it all, I hope?

Annie Jacobsen: The most recent State Department report on the Biological Weapons Convention, and by the way, this is also echoed in the report before that that was in the Biden administration, so this is a nonpartisan situation.

You have it across administrations. The [00:17:00] revelation there is that the Soviet program was not dismantled when the wall went down, but was rather absorbed. That's actually the word that they use. And for that reason, the State Department will tell you today that it is their position that Russia and North Korea both have active biological weapons programs, both illegal, and that China and Iran have programs of concern.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

Annie Jacobsen: That's a bit of a euphemism too.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, of course. Of concern, it, meaning we don't really know what they're doing. We just see the facility, and it's alarming what they've been dragging in and out. I, that whole thing freaks me out. Again, the book is, is spooky. I mean, nuclear winter, fine, okay, I'm already dead.

This watching everybody get sick and die, and then maybe you just get murdered by your neighbors for food is worse. I don't know. It's a coin flip. Which way do you want to go? Actually, I was going to ask you this. Which way would you prefer to go? Would you, would you prefer nuclear winter or, or the, is the bio threat, uh, you going to roll your [00:18:00] dice with that?

Annie Jacobsen: You know, one of the most prolific comments I got from readers of Nuclear War was exactly what you're talking about. They said, "You know what? I read your book. It was terrifying. I stayed up all night reading it. I want to go in the flash of blinding light." The

Jordan Harbinger: first wave.

Annie Jacobsen: Take me out, you know? Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm moving closer to Manhattan and DC just so I'm gone first.

Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: And then in biological war, or rather a biological incident, because it doesn't have to be an attack, that's what's so crazy, a biological catastrophe, a near extinction-level event can happen from an accident, from a lab leak. And so I'm of the Nikita Khrushchev quote, which was actually said in reference to nuclear war back during the Cold War, which is, "The survivors will envy the dead."

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's exactly how I feel about this especially. I mean, it's

Annie Jacobsen: You know what?

Jordan Harbinger: Quite terrifying.

Annie Jacobsen: I interviewed former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Your [00:19:00] younger listeners will- Yeah ... certainly not remember that right after 9/11 there was an anthrax attack.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: And originally it was attributed to terrorists.

The FBI was never able to solve the mystery, the crime. Lots of debates on that. Not a rabbit hole we need to go into right now. Okay. Can if you want to, but the, Tom Daschle had direct personal experience here because his office was targeted with a envelope of weaponized- Right ... anthrax.

Jordan Harbinger: I was going to say, I remember vaguely they were opening up envelopes that would be white powder.

It would get all over the desk and their hands, and they'd probably inhale some of it, and then it was like, "Let's test this. It's probably nothing," and it turns out to be anthrax. And yeah, the rabbit hole, I believe, as insofar as I went down, is who has access to this? Oh, well, people in labs and, like, foreign states, but they're not going to deliver it by sending a letter to Tom Daschle.

I, you know, what's the point of that? So it's just a crazy Unabomber science person? I don't know.

Annie Jacobsen: Tom Daschle said this to me, which really [00:20:00] echoes in my brain, because he has spent the decades since dedicated to biodefense. He really has been looking hard at this issue, trying to get a whole of government approach to a solution.

And what he said to me was that biological war would be death governmentally, death physically, death of everything you know. But this is what really got me. He said, "It will be people doing inhuman things to other people just to survive."

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's going to, what's like The Walking Dead or some- The Last of Us, some zombie show, because you'd, obviously you'd kill your neighbor if they had antibiotics and your wife was dying or your kids were dying, if you needed to get those, or you just need food, or you're, there's just a criminal element that's gone unchecked because the police force has checked out and they're taking care of their own fam- I mean, it's just, that's really scary.

Or the police

Annie Jacobsen: force is dead- Yeah, they're all dead ... because first responders are the first to go.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure, nurses, doctors, police, fire, yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: But inserting here a sort of a comment, which is that [00:21:00] the point of my writing this book is not panic, it's not panic, it's pressure. Because this is a human-made problem. This is not an asteroid-

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm

Annie Jacobsen: coming to Earth like that took out the dinosaurs. Right. This, like nuclear, this is a human-made potential catastrophe, therefore, the optimist in me must believe that there is a human solution.

Jordan Harbinger: What do you think the solution is? Just be prepared with a ton of vaccines and a distribution system or a, um-

Annie Jacobsen: That is certainly one component, and then you get into sort of biodefense utopia and a biological, technological, military industrial complex, potentially.

Different subject matter experts will tell you different ideas for the future. What I know as a journalist and as a storyteller, my lane is giving you the narrative, giving you the scenario of what can happen to educate you so that you have a better understanding of what to be aware of and also what to trust and what to [00:22:00] ask questions about.

I mean, it was stunning to me that I went through COVID not even really understanding how airborne pathogens are just in a wildly different category than anything else. Here's a little anecdote. That anthrax we were just talking about, weaponized anthrax. When Tom Daschle and others opened the en- or Tom Daschle didn't open, but one of his staffers did, opened the envelope which had weaponized anthrax in it.

The spores had been milled so small that they kind of were like baby powder, so they could be breathed in. Anthrax is what's called a dead-end host. It's- It

Jordan Harbinger: kills the host.

Annie Jacobsen: It kills the host and only the host.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Annie Jacobsen: Meaning it's not transmissible-

Jordan Harbinger: Right ...

Annie Jacobsen: which is remarkable to think about. And so it's really not nearly the same potential pandemic provider as something like pneumonic plague, as something that is airborne.

COVID was airborne. COVID had a case [00:23:00] fatality rate of 1%. Pneumonic plague, without antibiotics, has a case fatality rate of 100%.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. So if you, if you survive, you're just a rounding error. Uh, you're a

Annie Jacobsen: statistical-

Jordan Harbinger: No ... anomaly.

Annie Jacobsen: You are not a statistical anomaly. According to Dr. Henry Heim, one of the world's experts on pl- you get pneumonic plague, you are, without medical countermeasures- Really?

you're dead. You are dead. There's- There's no

Jordan Harbinger: scenario

Annie Jacobsen: in which- There's n- ... you

Jordan Harbinger: accidentally live. That's crazy.

Annie Jacobsen: There's no immunity. There's no asymptomatic carriers. Oh

Jordan Harbinger: my gosh.

Annie Jacobsen: You get it, you're dead. You have to have antibiotics in your system within 24 hours.

Jordan Harbinger: That's really horrifying, because of course the question is how quickly can we distribute antibiotics to literally everyone?

And I'm going to guess it's not within 24 hours.

Annie Jacobsen: It's not within 24 hours, and that is why in all of the Pentagon declassified war games I looked at and discussed with sources, and also the unclassified war [00:24:00] games, pandemic exercises that are done by public health officials, in all of them, the idea of anarchy and insurrection is top threat for precisely the reason you're saying.

Yeah. Everybody is scrambling to get antibiotics, to get medical countermeasures, vaccines for their family members, under extraordinary conditions, willing to do whatever is necessary.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. I can understand that. I mean, the airplane delivery system is, it was kind of a funny thing for me in the book, uh, as funny as it could be in a book about biological warfare, because I remember during COVID they made such a big deal of how, hey, the air's filtered in the airplane.

You can't even infect the person next to you. Look at this diagram we drew. And it's like, well, wait a minute. That's not going to happen at all. You're just going to infect everybody else on the plane, or at least the several of the people around you. And so that kind of flies in the face of what they told us, what American Airlines [00:25:00] or whatever told us during COVID when they wrote their op-eds in, uh, every major newspaper.

You can fly. We filter the air. It's totally fine.

Annie Jacobsen: It's such a bad look giving out- Yeah ... bogus information.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: I'm going to give you an anecdote here, which is just the leading example of this. COVID was airborne.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: For the first three months of COVID, the CDC, America's premier public health agency in charge of things, and the WHO, the international community's chief in charge, these two organizations repeatedly tweeted out, "COVID not airborne," N-O-T in capital letters.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, wow.

Annie Jacobsen: I reprinted one of the tweets in the book because it's almost impossible to believe, and yet COVID was airborne.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Annie Jacobsen: COVID was airborne, and even more distressing to me is the fact that All these years later, neither the CDC nor the [00:26:00] WHO has provided an explanation, or rather sort of a, like a, you know, a sort of apology for being wrong, which is perfectly understandable when you are dealing with biology.

It is squishy science. There are many unknowns. But at least let the American people, let the world know, "Hey, guys, we made this mistake, and we're going to work toward not- Yeah ... making the kind of mistakes in the future. But by saying nothing, extraordinary conspiracies have developed because of this.

Extraordinary alternative narratives-

Jordan Harbinger: Sure ...

Annie Jacobsen: as I prefer to call them.

Jordan Harbinger: Also, they said, "Hey, don't buy masks. They don't work." And then it was, "Hey, so the masks do work. We just need them for the first responders." And then it, after that people were kind of like, "Okay, I just don't believe anything you say. You're a completely non-credible source of information," which is pretty dangerous when you're talking about the two bodies that everybody should go, "Hey, it was the WHO and the CDC.

Let's follow their instructions." Even me, who, I'm not a conspiracy theorist at all. Everybody on the show, I'm kind of the opposite of that. [00:27:00] I do a lot of shows against it. Now I'm thinking, "Well, if they tweet next, 'Hey, don't buy masks,' the first thing I'm going to do is go buy masks, because I've seen this movie before."

So they've completely blown it, and I don't know how you recover from that.

Annie Jacobsen: And I don't believe that there's was any sort of malintent in any of this.

Jordan Harbinger: No.

Annie Jacobsen: It was just simply unknown. Here's another one. Do you remember in those original months when everyone, we were told that you could catch COVID from this tabletop, for example?

I

Jordan Harbinger: vaguely

Annie Jacobsen: remember, yeah. Right? And, and, and I remember because trying to buy Lysol at Target- Right ... was impossible. It was sold out.

Jordan Harbinger: People would sanitize their grocery delivery, which was completely pointless.

Annie Jacobsen: People are wearing those blue gloves that they didn't need to. Yeah. And this went on and on and on, and that is called fomite transmission.

That's, like, the fancy scientific term for it, okay?

Jordan Harbinger: Fomite is when you touch a surface?

Annie Jacobsen: Yes. That's- I've never heard that ... fomite transmission. Okay. Okay. All these years later, now the statistic on how you can catch COVID from a fomite is one [00:28:00] in 10,000. So-

Jordan Harbinger: I see ...

Annie Jacobsen: that's completely bad information to have pushed for several months.

Now, that the CDC entered into a partnership with Lysol, to my eye is extremely distressing.

Jordan Harbinger: Wait, that happened?

Annie Jacobsen: That happened, and again- Oh

Jordan Harbinger: my gosh ...

Annie Jacobsen: sourced in the book. Your friendly partner, Lysol.

Jordan Harbinger: That is insane. So it's almost like, hey, we c- I bet we can sell a lot of Lysol if we just convince the CDC to say that it'll disinfect CO- I mean, that is so sinister and insane to me.

Annie Jacobsen: And again, I have no reason to know that Lysol executives were sitting around twirling their mustache-

Jordan Harbinger: Shit ...

Annie Jacobsen: coming up with ideas. Right. But that is what happened.

Jordan Harbinger: After writing Nuclear War, which you came on the show before to discuss, what made you decide that biological war was the next thing? And, and God knows, what are you cooking up now?

Should I even... Am I even allowed to ask?

Annie Jacobsen: When I was reporting that, I was talking to sort of cabinet-level officials and presidential advisors, [00:29:00] and time and again, people would say to me, "We're talking about nuclear, but you have to look at bio next." And that was extremely unnerving because it was always said in a way that w- felt like the shark in the water, you know?

A kind of-

Jordan Harbinger: Like, "Oh, you're afraid of nukes?"

Annie Jacobsen: Yeah. "

Jordan Harbinger: Let me tell you."

Annie Jacobsen: And here's the real spoiler alert. It's a chart I show in the book also, which is that I found a, what's called a threat spectrum. It's a presentation within the Defense Department, unclassified, but for official use only, that demonstrates WMD, weapons of mass destruction, and where they sit on the scale of destructiveness.

And of course, nuclear weapons are the most destructive.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

Annie Jacobsen: But biological weapons are considered the greatest overall threat.

Jordan Harbinger: Because you need a missile, you need an ICBM to launch a nuke. They can be detected. Your program can get intercepted. Whereas, I don't know, the bio stuff, what do you need? Like, a university laboratory to not follow safety protocols one time?

Annie Jacobsen: With nuclear, [00:30:00] there's an extremely high barrier for entry. You have to have fissile material, uranium, weapons-grade uranium. Look at the news about Iran. Yeah. We all know about that. Nuclear weapons need a delivery system, a very complex ICBM, submarine, bomber. So these nuclear weapons are kept inside the command and control systems of the nations that have nuclear weapons.

That is one argument why we have not had an incident, an accident, or an actual nuclear use in 80 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Biological weapons, totally different animal. The barrier for entry is painfully low. With officials, defense officials, public health officials, anyone in the business of preventing this will tell you a biological weapon can be made in a basement by a high school student with a very [00:31:00] limited knowledge of biology, thanks to AI computational systems.

That is terrifying.

Jordan Harbinger: Good news, you survived airport security. Bad news, the guy coughing up blood in 7A might have brought a genetically engineered souvenir from Siberia. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Article. My in-laws recently got a brand-new kitchen, although my father-in-law was the last person to know about it.

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We truly appreciate your support. Now back to Annie Jacobsen.

We were talking about this before we hit record, which is that I've done shows on synthetic biology and things like that with Rob Reid. I don't know if that name has come [00:34:00] across your desk, but he was saying on the show that eventually there'll be 3D printers that can print biological material.

But even before that, like you said, a high schooler who's got a really good chemistry set can ask AI how to make different component parts and, and order things off the internet. You can order viruses from a lot of places. Maybe they've clamped down on that a little, I don't know. But if you're a researcher, you can order things from places and they will send it to you, and they'll maybe make sure you have a real laboratory, but maybe they also won't, or you'll get somebody who's too busy to do that that day, or your name looks like similar to somebody who they've seen before and they let it go.

It's just really scary how little sort of oversight there is. This is not... You're not getting something from the CDC. You're getting something from a supplier, and like you said, you don't have to be a crazy genius to do it. Someone could even do it almost by accident trying to make something else. And certainly, there are smart people that would love to kill a huge number of people.

I mean, look at the Unabomber. Remember that guy? He was a genius. And you've got nation states that might decide they have nothing to lose by planting this [00:35:00] somewhere and making a dead man switch. I mean, it's just really scary if you've got a good imagination to see how this could all be used or misused.

Annie Jacobsen: Which is part of the point, I think, of it's not about panic as much as it's about it's about pressure. To your point that there is oversight, that some oversight is in place, and this is m- largely because of incidents that have happened in the past- Right ... where someone orders plague in the, you know, Yersinia pestis in the mail, gets it, and then makes an announcement, "Hey, look what I did"- Yeah

to make a point because it's not illegal, or it didn't used to be. Right. And that's crazy. But to your point, all it takes is one madman. And you see in these unclassified war games I was referring to, and I mention a number of them in the book kind of as these little history lesson type vignettes, officials in the United States gaming out different bad actors that might attempt to do this.

And so it's not like it's not on [00:36:00] the minds of government officials. The question is how to tighten the bolts.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's, uh, oh, man, it starts to really... You, you might have trouble sleeping the night after you read this book. Just saying. Uh, it's very interesting, and I recommend it, but it, it... Read it on a Friday so that you can sleep in on Saturday if you have a little bit of a rough go falling asleep.

How do researchers decide whether a dangerous biological experiment should even proceed? Because a lot of this stuff is dual-use, right? Yet I kind of hope somebody here is looking at this stuff so that if Iran or the Soviet Union or North Korea or whoever... Sorry, the Soviet Union, no longer quite a threat.

Uh , if maybe Russia, that bioweapons program that's been absorbed. I want to know that we have a vaccine or they've seen something like this or they thought maybe it would happen and th- there's at least a document that says what needs to be done. But also, I don't know, that same research project that goes to make the vaccine could also have a sample of this frozen somewhere that ends up getting out in the middle of Maryland, right?

Annie Jacobsen: And you've touched upon the [00:37:00] essence, the dark heart of the debate, because this is called dual-use research of concern. Genetic engineering began only in the early 1970s when a scientist at Stanford University named Paul Berg, he'd go on to win the Nobel Prize, was the first person who was able to genetically modify a germ, right?

And he was doing it for exactly the reasons that you speak of. Like, we are going to be able to solve medical mysteries in the same way that Pasteur in developing penicillin was able to essentially stamp out all of these deaths that were occurring from infection, from bacterial infections, among them plague. And this idea that a scientist wants to do good is the premise, is how it all began.

But very quickly, and in Berg's own interviews, he [00:38:00] says, "We weren't thinking about biological weapons, and we should have been." Because that is precisely what someone else is going to be thinking about always. Right. Always. And so there you get into the other question that you raised, which is, and this is where it's called gain-of-function research, which almost no one in the world but a group of scientists had ever heard of before COVID.

Now a lot of people are familiar with it, gain-of-function. Exactly like it sounds, you are trying to get a pathogen to gain new functions, to become more virulent, to become easier to transmit, to make something that wasn't airborne, and most nefariously, to defeat an existing immunity to something. So those are the basic components of biological weapons engineering.

But in these same labs, you have scientists saying, "We need to be able to create the really bad pathogens so that we can test how to defeat [00:39:00] them with medical countermeasures." Now you have a chicken and the egg scenario- Yeah ... which is what's happening.

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, this is the logic behind almost every arms race, right?

We need to develop AI, uh, capability to do, t- for warfare so that we can game it out when China does it first. And everybody's thinking the same thing, especially with bioweapons.

Annie Jacobsen: On that point, like, the more countermeasures you do, like you create a ICBM, and then you create, you know, interceptor missiles to shoot down the ICBMs.

Well, now you have the other side saying, "Well, wait a minute, they're preparing to shoot ours down." That's actually an aggressive move- Mm-hmm ... not a defensive move. It's why nuclear treaties, one of the most powerful ones that's now fallen out of effect, was to limit the amount of interceptor missiles that a country could have because it kind of forecasted to their adversaries, their enemies, an offensive posture- Right

Jordan Harbinger: if you

Annie Jacobsen: will.

Jordan Harbinger: We're trying to erase your deterrent ability.

Annie Jacobsen: Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: And so this is classic catch-22.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, this is very disturbing. And the, this Soviet program, I'd [00:40:00] love to go back to this because this, I think it was called, like, Biopreparat or something like that. Uh, I don't speak Russian, so I'll take- Good

Annie Jacobsen: job on the pronunciation.

Is

Jordan Harbinger: that, is that close?

Annie Jacobsen: Biopreparat. Yes. I mean, how you want to transliterate it-

Jordan Harbinger: Sure ...

Annie Jacobsen: we get the idea.

Jordan Harbinger: But this facility in Obolensk was pretty creative. I mean, it was supposed to look like, what, an asylum or something like that? Where... Tell me about this place, because that, it, it'll, it's straight out of a Bond movie, this whole thing.

Annie Jacobsen: Sometimes the details you get from primary sources are amazing, and th- thank you for noticing one of them. Igor Domaradski, I mentioned him earlier because he was the sort of the, the originator of a lot of the Soviet plague related biological weapons work. But he was also a leading scientist that was working on plague vaccines for the Russian people.

And after the wall went down, he ended up spending time in America with a now 90-plus-year-old subject matter expert in biological weapons named [00:41:00] Milton Leitenberg, whom I interviewed, who lent me Domaradski's Hand-typed diaries over a number of years-

Jordan Harbinger: Wow ...

Annie Jacobsen: from which- They're in

Jordan Harbinger: Russian, though, yeah?

Annie Jacobsen: No, they were translated into English.

Oh, I see. I think Domoradsky ha- or someone translated them. I was reading them in English. But Leitenberg FedExed me this group of documents, saying, "You have to FedEx them back to me immediately," which I did. But I share them with readers because you get original details which are mind-blowing and really make it human.

And the one you point out, Domoradsky explains there was a facility that was dealing mostly with bacterial pathogens. The Vector facility was dealing with viruses. That's in Siberia. Oblensk was interestingly not far from Moscow- Yeah ... something like 50 miles south, and that is where they were weaponizing bacteria, and they were weaponizing plague.

But he explained to Leitenberg in these journals that they wanted to keep what was happening there out of the awareness of [00:42:00] the evil Americans who were spying on them- Mm-hmm ... from space with our early satellite systems in the '70s. Sure. And so they dressed people up in pajamas and had them playing volleyball as if the facility was a mental institution and the people were the patients.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez, that's crazy.

Annie Jacobsen: The lengths at which you go to try and trick the other side is really creative.

Jordan Harbinger: Imagine having that job. Like, "Sergei, it's f- negative five degrees, but we need you outside." Put your pajamas on. Put your pajamas on.

Annie Jacobsen: Get the

Jordan Harbinger: volleyball. Get the volleyball and go outside. It's only four hours.

Just play for four straight hours. Sorry, comrade. Aren't you glad you got a PhD?

Annie Jacobsen: It's so remarkable because I do know a bit about space satellites, and the satellite systems in the '70s, I'm not so sure they could really tell the difference- Yeah, maybe not ... between an army uniform and a pair of pajamas. It speaks to this idea of the Soviets' [00:43:00] perception of American technology.

Jordan Harbinger: We had them scared, I guess. Actually, if you know about spy satellites, early spy satellites, did they just make digital cameras in the '60s and '70s? No, no, no, no. Or did they have film that dropped out into and then went and got it? What?

Annie Jacobsen: So when I was writing Area 51, I interviewed the CIA's first director of the Directorate of Science and Technology.

It didn't exist before- Wow ... the 19- early 1960s, and then it suddenly did, and now it's, like, arguably the most important component.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure. This is the Q branch

Annie Jacobsen: type- Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Annie Jacobsen: Yes. Wow. Absolutely. So Dr. Bud Wheelon, head of, uh, S&T it was called, was also, by his own qualifications, the mayor of Area 51. Okay. He was in charge of the U-2 spy plane and the A-12 Oxcart spy plane, both CIA programs, espionage platforms being developed out at Area 51 in the middle of a nuclear test site because it would keep everybody away.

But Wheelon is also the father of satellite [00:44:00] technology. He developed the very first American system called Corona. And in our interviews, this was back in 2010, he took me through a lot of that early technology, which was remarkable. And you're absolutely right. The first Corona satellites, literally they took wet film Actual wet film made by Kodak.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Annie Jacobsen: The film would drop out of the sky with a parachute attached to it. The film would literally be in a sort of basket-like contraption, and then an Air Force plane would work with a hook to try and hook the falling... I kid you not. Oh my God. There are actually photographs that have been declassified.

Yeah. You can go to the NRO website and look at them. So you think about the trial and error. If the aircraft misses- Yeah ... and is unable to hook, you just lost all the satellite photos into the sea.

Jordan Harbinger: Really? They didn't float? Yes. [00:45:00] Come on,

Annie Jacobsen: guys. Well, they would be waterlogged. I interviewed different pilots that were assigned to go and find the missing footage because God forbid somebody else gets a hold of it.

Yeah. It's really interesting old school tech.

Jordan Harbinger: That is so insane to me, and then they go and they develop this, and it's like, "All right, what's it at these coordinates?" And they're like, "Um, a bunch of crazy people playing volleyball in the snow." "That's it?" "Yeah. Good thing we flew over the ocean and zapped this film basket because we need, this is all we're getting from it."

That to me is just absolute madness. I, it's-

Annie Jacobsen: I have the great fortune of having interviewed a lot of these sort of individuals right there at that cusp of history in the '60s when technology was really shifting, and by the way, so much of it came out of the Vietnam War. And it's fascinating to look at that and consider where we are now with science and technology moving not just at the speed of light, but faster than any kind of [00:46:00] governance can keep up.

Oh, yeah. Certainly faster than the courts, faster than democracy itself.

Jordan Harbinger: I've got a friend who's... I actually don't know what he does for real, but he's got all kinds of crazy stories. He's an older guy, and before Vladimir Putin was the enemy of the West, he was maybe a friend of the West, and so he was teaching Vladimir Putin stuff about Western economics.

And he said that Vladimir Putin called him once after he wa- he was dropping his kids off at school. Wow. He said, "Vladimir Putin calls my cell phone and says, 'Hey, do you have a minute?'" And he says, "Sure," and he goes, "Great. Pull into the next driveway. Well, not the next one, the one after that." Literally, so he wanted, he goes, "He wanted me to know he was watching me in real time," and I thought, "Oh, that's real?"

Because I assumed that was some nonsense movie stuff, and this was like 2001 probably or 2002. I don't remember when Putin sort of, wh- when we, we decided he was up to no good, maybe 2005, 2008. So this is early enough where I thought, "You can't really watch someone live from a satellite." Apparently, the Russians could [00:47:00] already do that.

even then. So God knows what they can do now. Take your temperature? Probably.

Annie Jacobsen: That's a great story. It's very spooky.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's very spoo- And this is an older guy. He's not, this was not even a... I'm 100% sure he's not making it up. He's just one of those types of, of guys. So the technology is unreal. They

Annie Jacobsen: also might have had tagging, tracking technology- They could have been watching him

Jordan Harbinger: on the road

Annie Jacobsen: too, yeah

on him. Yes. Yeah. You don't know, but that's an important part of all of it, is the sort of paranoia factor. The, the idea that you would make someone think, "Oh my God, they can see me anywhere." Are, and make them wonder, "Are they watching me from space? Is it a tagging system? Do they have cameras on me on the ground?"

That's all part and parcel to kind of control and paranoia.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's a good point. Now that I think about it, I wonder how he knew they were watching him from space and not just some guy in traffic behind him, which is a far more plausible actual explanation for that. Either way,

Annie Jacobsen: same result.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's

Annie Jacobsen: true.

Same result. You get this feeling of omniscient power.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:00] Yeah, and that was his, the whole point was to intimidate him. Absolutely. Which is strange, because he was, like, going to Vladimir Putin's dacha to teach him stuff. He's like, "Why are... You don't need to do this. Like, I already, I'm already, I understand that you control a massive army and spy force.

You don't have to freak me out. There's no benefit to this." And the phone call was pretty benign, apparently. It was, like, a logistical phone ca- The whole point of the phone call was to actually scare him. Mm-hmm. The message wasn't even important, apparently.

Annie Jacobsen: Absolutely.

Jordan Harbinger: So I thought that

Annie Jacobsen: was interesting.

That's how they keep people on their toes.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. What was going on in this building? They're doing the bacteria gain-of-function research. Is it specialized by floor? I'm so curious about this villain lair.

Annie Jacobsen: Yeah, it's really interesting. I refer to a, an event, a conference that took place there in 1989, and we know about this from the memoir of Ken Alibek, who was the deputy director of Biopreparat.

We know about this from another Soviet bioweapons engineer that had since defected [00:49:00] to the United States, named Sergei Popov. And the men gathered in an auditorium, which was in the middle of this building. And by the way, you can Google Obolensk, and you can see images of this facility. It's very spooky.

It's like- It's

Jordan Harbinger: still there.

Annie Jacobsen: It's still there now, by all means, but the images from, like, I believe it was the '90s, it looks like a giant whale. It's a- Oh, weird ... like a glass whale.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

Annie Jacobsen: It's very spooky. And- I

Jordan Harbinger: Google mapped it.

Annie Jacobsen: Yeah. I

Jordan Harbinger: didn't think

Annie Jacobsen: to look for- Yeah. L- look, and- ...

Jordan Harbinger: older photos ...

Annie Jacobsen: and then, um, there's an auditorium in the side with n- inside, in the very middle with no windows, and the scientists were not allowed to bring any notes inside.

Or rather, they could take notes, but they weren't allowed to take them with them, so the minders picked up all the notes. From what I understand, research of the different bacterial pathogens were being worked on, on different floors. You know, you'd have anthrax on one floor and plague on another floor.

Jordan Harbinger: What a cheery working environment that must have been.

Annie Jacobsen: But in this [00:50:00] 1989 conference, that was a very groundbreaking moment because it's when Sergei Popov, who was an engineer who had been sent to Oxford in England to commandeer genetic m- modification techniques from the West. Of course, Ca- actually it was Cambridge, I believe.

They had no idea what he was doing there. They just thought, "Oh, nice Russian scientist on sabbatical." And he had been ordered to steal the secrets, and then brought them back, and with his team, worked on what became known as a booby trap weapon. So nefarious in nature, and not only was it built to defeat medical countermeasures, but very specifically, it had a super paranoid evil component to it, which is it was designed to insert a pathogen into the pathogen so that when you took...

Like, let's, they were [00:51:00] working with plague. You would take plague. You would get plague. You would immediately know, "I must take antibiotics within 24 hours as I, or I will die. But the Soviet bioweapons engineers had then manipulated the plague pathogen so that in taking the antibiotic, it would trigger, like a booby trap weapon, a second disease, encephalitis, the swelling of the brain- Oh my

which would kill you in an equally horrific way.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Annie Jacobsen: But even worse was the idea behind it. They wanted Americans to die en masse with the last thought in their mind being, "I've been betrayed by my government that told me to take this antibiotic, and now it's killing me."

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Then people are going, "Don't get the antibiotics.

Uh, that actually kills you faster." I mean, it kind of reminds me of the, the disinformation around COVID, like, "Oh, the ventilators are killing people." Well, no, you're very near death already, [00:52:00] and this is a last resort, so it's like a causation thing. But here it really was- Yes ... causing

Annie Jacobsen: the

Jordan Harbinger: encephalitis. And when,

Annie Jacobsen: when you consider that that sort of dark, nefarious idea was built into the biological weapon- It really sends a shiver up the spine- Yeah

because it's so based in paranoia, it's so based in disinformation, and it's a really big plug for why good information, good dialogue in the United States of America today is such an important ideal that people, I believe, must be working toward. Call me a Pollyanna, but if we continue on this path of tribalism and score keeping and self-righteous indignation about the other individual's idea about what COVID really was, rather than taking a real hard look at what happened and what we can do better- [00:53:00]

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah

Annie Jacobsen: we're just destined for a really bad situation in the future.

Jordan Harbinger: I agree 100%. I, I was, I was pretty fired up about COVID and disinformation. I still am, but it's a, I've become a little bit more sympathetic maybe, or empathetic to people who d- had distrust in the medical system, especially people who are... This sounds very, uh, I suppose lefty, and I'm not that guy, but people who've been mistreated by the medical system historically.

No wonder, of course, they don't trust what's going on. What reason did poor Black people in the South have to trust the medical system in the begi- like, your grandpa was in the Tuskegee experiments, of course you don't trust this, or you have a distrust for the system in general. So th- that whole thing, I've gradually come around a little bit more on this, and it, that's, of course, going to be a big problem when we face a real pandemic.

And so one thing that's just occurred to me, the Russians, the Soviets back then said, "We're just trying to prevent this from happening to us," right? That was the justification. We're trying to engineer this so that we can make a vaccine against it. But [00:54:00] that whole sort of Trojan horse with the second encephalitis virus in there, I don't know, that makes it seem far less credible that this is just them trying to prevent something.

Annie Jacobsen: Oh, well, hard correction there if I misspoke. The, in the Cold War, in, from the sort of advent of genetic modification, from the signing of the BWC, the treaty, all the way through the defector, Poseshnik, coming and revealing the biological weapons program, which happened in the late 1980s, that entire time, the Soviets were absolutely doing biological weapons engineering.

They were building an arsenal of biological weapons. I

Jordan Harbinger: see.

Annie Jacobsen: They were not called m- medical countermeasures. People like- Got it ... Domaradski was also working on vaccines, so that Cold War, bio-warfare 101, vaccinate your own people, kill theirs.

Jordan Harbinger: I

Annie Jacobsen: see. That, yes, you want to have medical countermeasure of your people, but there was no, absolutely no question that what they were working on were biological weapons to kill tens of millions or hundreds of millions of [00:55:00] their enemies in the West because, now here is a real hinge according to the Soviet defectors When people would ask them, "But wait a minute, you're a scientist.

How could you have done this?"

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Annie Jacobsen: It's so dark. And they said, "Because we were told by our handlers the Americans are cheating and doing this too."

Jordan Harbinger: Right. But we, so far, were not doing that or did you find any evidence of us doing it also?

Annie Jacobsen: As far as I know, there exists no evidence that the United States was working on biological weapons during the Cold War period after the signing of the treaty.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

Annie Jacobsen: We most certainly had built a colossal arsenal of biological weapons before. I write about this- Oh, good ... in Operation Paperclip.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

Annie Jacobsen: Not even a question.

Jordan Harbinger: Got

Annie Jacobsen: it. We brought Nazi scientists who were running Hitler's biological weapons program- Right ... over here. So we were not saints. Everyone was building biological weapons.

Got it. Treaty happens [00:56:00] 1972. Okay, we're all going to destroy our arsenals. Not only did Russia not destroy their arsenals, but they amped up their program, and we now know that is actually on the record true.

Jordan Harbinger: And in theory they're still doing it?

Annie Jacobsen: According to Russia, when the wall came down, they had a big denouement where they were like, "We are so sorry."

Um, they even admitted to having this, or at least Yeltsin sort of did. Um, we will dismantle it. There are a number of people, some of whom I interview in the book, who went to Russia in the years after the wall came down, Andy Weber among them, who worked really hard with Russian scientists to destroy these arsenals, but more importantly, not to sell them.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: Because think about how poor everyone was. Of course. And for example, Andy Weber tells me a story that at the Vector research facility, the BSL4 lab where he was in the early '90s dealing with the chief scientist negotiating like, "Let's destroy these or at least [00:57:00] we'll take them and destroy them," the Iranians were there at

Jordan Harbinger: the time.

guy from Iran offered me $10 million. Your offer is to take it and wreck it? No, thanks.

Annie Jacobsen: Exactly. Well, you know, if you could meet their price, they would destroy it, and Weber was responsible for a lot of that. He'd be a really interesting person-

Jordan Harbinger: I

Annie Jacobsen: bet ... to come talk to you because he has decades of experience in this role.

And interestingly, he has a very, you know, on the one hand, he's very practical about understanding what the threat is, but he also does have a kind of belief that biotechnology can solve a lot of these problems, can result in medical countermeasures to quickly deal with outbreaks. At the same time, he calls gain of function a euphemism for biological weapons engineering.

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Now, back to Annie Jacobsen.

I think a lot of people are scared of gain-of-function [01:00:00] research. Uh, you listen to Sam Harris, he's got a few episodes on this, and it, it is terrifying. Like, oh, we just want to see if we can make, I don't know, smallpox airborne and more deadly. Okay, you did it. Congratulations. You have a solution for this?

Yeah, but it's a solution that run... It's, what's that thing they say about lying? It's halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on. The, the, the plague is going to be halfway around the world before the vaccine gets its shoes on, at least in the United States, judging by our COVID countermeasures or lack thereof, and that was, what, 1% deadly?

So imagine something that's 98% deadly, or 90%, or just 50. A mere 20%.

Annie Jacobsen: I mean, look, there are lots of other diseases that are- Yeah ... like hantavirus has a 30% case fatality rate. Right.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that,

Annie Jacobsen: I did think

Jordan Harbinger: of that one right

Annie Jacobsen: away. I mean, you know, and, and imagine COVID 1%. Okay, so just 2%. Think of twice- Right ... as many people dying.

I mean, this is really on a scale of disaster, of catastrophe.

Jordan Harbinger: Was this a great intelligence failure of the Cold War that we didn't know about this place in advance and-

Annie Jacobsen: Most certainly, [01:01:00] yes.

Jordan Harbinger: So Pasechnik defects. Did he go to the Canadian embassy first and get tossed out the door? That's a little terrifying.

Annie Jacobsen: He did. Another anecdote that's pretty shocking. They didn't believe him. He said, "You know, I'm part of a Soviet weapons program, and I need to talk to someone." Hm. And they said, "Bug off."

Jordan Harbinger: Jeez.

Annie Jacobsen: Then he called- The British. They took him very seriously, and a day later he found himself in a safe house in London across from Dr.

Christopher Davis, who at the time was a surgeon commander with the Royal Navy and also had the job title of, you know, handling biological weapons, which was a- almost, as he explained it to me, a non-job because no one believed that anyone was actually making biological weapons.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. He was the g- man in charge of fighting ghosts, and it's like, "Okay, buddy."

Annie Jacobsen: It was like The X-Files, you know? And then this guy walks in, and he realizes, "Oh my God," and he became this incredible source for, of information, and actually ended up, um, winning the [01:02:00] highest, one of the highest honors from the Queen of England.

Jordan Harbinger: It's really scary that this guy walks into an embassy, and a State Depart- well, Canadian State Department official just says, "I don't know.

I'm hungry. This is a bunch of crap. I don't believe it." And not like, "Maybe I should refer this to the U.S. and see if they care," but just, "Get out of here." That is really, really scary, because we basically came this close to missing him. Because what he could have done is gotten killed by the Russians on his way out the door, gone somewhere else and said, "Screw it, I'm just going to go to Venezuela and live out the rest of my life and d- disappear.

No one's going to believe me." But luckily he gave it another swing and managed to get a hit. I mean, that's just luck at that point.

Annie Jacobsen: It is, and even more remarkable is the fact that Poseshnik was one of a very rare group of individuals, you can probably count them on one hand, who were actually allowed to leave Russia.

He was on a laboratory equipment buying trip.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

Annie Jacobsen: And like Dolmaratsky, for example, in his notes he explains how he was always trying to leave. He'd be invited to these conventions, [01:03:00] and at the last minute, the Russians would refuse him t- you know, uh, the, the ability to leave. He'd have to tell everyone, you know, "I broke my leg."

You know, something like that. And so Poseshnik was so important that he not only had all this information, but he was important because he needed to go buy the sort of unique laboratory equipment and disguise what he was doing as public health related-

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm ...

Annie Jacobsen: and not weapons related. And he had this moment of a crisis of conscience where he was like, "I can't keep doing this."

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. He must have known some absolutely just very disturb... He was losing a lot of sleep, I think, over this. Did he describe how they planned to disperse this? I'm curious. What do you do? Yes. Do you spray it somewhere? Like, how does it work?

Annie Jacobsen: Yes. It, what's interesting now where we are, this idea of an airborne pathogen is so simple and so clear that the weapons system, the delivery system, is [01:04:00] essentially the human lungs.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: So you don't need cruise missiles, but back in the Cold War, the idea was to fill a warhead with a biological weapon. And fire it in an ICBM at the United States, which involved so much engineering. Mm-hmm. When you think about temperature- Yeah ... you know, you're talking about a living weapon. You have to keep it alive.

That's true. I mean, it was incredible what they were doing, and then they developed systems to fire cruise missiles essentially out of submarines, sneak up close to the East or West Coast of America, fire a missile that would go under radar, and then let loose a warhead and disperse plague or anthrax or smallpox over the population.

It was a lot of work, and Pasechnik was also in charge of that engineering team, which added serious credibility and threat level to what he was describing, first to his British [01:05:00] handlers and then to the CIA.

Jordan Harbinger: What's crazy is then, of course, you know it came from prob- You'd know immediately it came from the Soviets.

You could fire nukes back. Boom, everybody dies. It's, it's nuclear winter at that point. Now you could do it with... You could hire a h- 200 girls off of Instagram, infect all of them, and say, "All right. We're sending you to party, and we're sending a cameraman with you to make some content," and send them to every major Western city.

Just dance with a bunch of guys. I mean, that's really all you would need to do to disperse something like this now. It'll cost you a few million dollars.

Annie Jacobsen: Attribution is a huge problem, but th- you know, working against that is, of course, this idea that biological catastrophe, the unleashing of a genetically modified pathogen with a high case fatality rate, everybody's going to die.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Annie Jacobsen: You can't save yourself, and so you're into the madman theory of use, of intentional use, or you're into the lab accident conundrum.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Didn't... Wasn't there a guy who, s- Ustinov or something, he'd injected something into his [01:06:00] thumb?

Annie Jacobsen: That's right. That was at the Vector lab.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: These little anecdotes and, or stories rather that one is able to source from firsthand sources, sometimes people write memoirs and they reference these things, and also looking at declassified documents are really insightful.

It's kind of a weird word, and I write them out as little history lessons in the book to kind of pause from the horrific drama going on- ... to give you some to give you some context. Again, that while a lot of this reads like science fiction, it is science fact-based.

Jordan Harbinger: That man who injected the Marburg virus into his thumb, he documented his own death.

So what, what were his last days like?

Annie Jacobsen: So Dr. Ustinov was working with Marburg. It's a viral hemorrhagic fever that's like a cousin to Ebola.

Jordan Harbinger: Oof.

Annie Jacobsen: So it's just horrifically gruesome. It, you know, you bleed to death out your eyeballs, and your ears- My gosh ... and your nose and your mouth and every other orifice, and there [01:07:00] is no cure.

The Soviets were weaponizing it inside the Vector lab, which is the locus of the inciting incident in my scenario, biological war scenario. And this was in the '80s, and Ustinov is working, he's working to weaponize Marburg, to make it more transmissible, because it's transmissible through fluid contact.

Jordan Harbinger: Just like Ebola, right?

Annie Jacobsen: Yes. So, you know, it's good to know that, like, if somebody in the other room has Ebola, you and I are not going to get Ebola.

Jordan Harbinger: No.

Annie Jacobsen: If some- I might

Jordan Harbinger: leave anyway, but yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: You and I might go out the window or out the fire escape. Yeah. Right. But if somebody in this room has pneumonic plague-

Jordan Harbinger: Which, too late for us

Annie Jacobsen: we're going to get pneumonic plague. Wow. That's airborne. And so Ustinov was trying to make this more transmissible, among other things, and he is injecting Marburg into a guinea pig, a, a small animal to kind of test this, and he injects himself. It goes into his body, and [01:08:00] there is a death sentence immediately.

He calls his superior. You can kind of imagine, like, him picking up one of those red analog phones. Right. Right. You know? And the superior's like, "Go to, you know, the biosafety facility/hospital," which is really just a room, and he goes in there, and there is a notebook left by his bedside table Which he writes his thoughts as he dies over the next two weeks, bleeding out.

And those who saw the notebook describe it as being, you know, spattered with blood.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, I guess they couldn't help him, but you think, like, they didn't even euthanize this guy. They wanted the journal? I don't understand. Why did they leave him alive for so long?

Annie Jacobsen: Euthanizing him, it would probably cause unrest among the other scientists maybe, I'm guessing.

I, he was probably

Jordan Harbinger: begging for it by day three, though.

Annie Jacobsen: Right? I mean, they gave him, uh, what we would call here in the West palliative care. You know, when you know- Okay ... someone's going to die [01:09:00] and you're just trying to make them more comfortable.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

Annie Jacobsen: But what was also interesting is after he died, they came up with this idea because when a pathogen moves through the body, it mutates.

This is by Mother Nature's own design, and we saw that with COVID, whereby there were different strains that would have-

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, Delta variant.

Annie Jacobsen: Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: And then it became less deadly, I believe, over time.

Annie Jacobsen: And that's what happens as the pathogen moves through people, through the environment. And so they wanted to look at Ustinov's organs after he died, and they harvested them very quickly, and they came up with this idea that they could make bioweapons out of his organs.

And so allegedly stored in that Vector lab is what's called Marburg variant U for Ustinov.

Jordan Harbinger: Patient Zero, basically, ready to be thawed out. That is really grim. Do you think they're still there, his organs just sitting in a freezer somewhere?

Annie Jacobsen: I think [01:10:00] transparency is something that is radically missing from all of this.

You

Jordan Harbinger: think?

Annie Jacobsen: Yeah. You know? Well, look, it's, it's why the nuclear treaties were so- Oh, man ... important. We're now out of them, but nuclear treaties meant that weapons inspectors could go and look at what a country was holding.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: And if you could do that with bio, it would take a lot of the mystery out of it.

It would take ul- ultimately a lot of the paranoia out of it, and that is certainly something in my push for pressure, not panic, you know, most certainly should happen. And diplomats in the United States will tell you that time and time again, that were there some kind of a come to Jesus moment about bio, then weapons inspectors could look at what people have, and the individual nations would be perhaps a little more inclined to destroy the most [01:11:00] deadly, most nefarious pathogens that are clearly for nothing other than being a biological weapon.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Oh my gosh. That is really grotesque that they recovered his organs and then froze them for research material. I mean, that's just... This is like a, watching a low-budget horror movie where it's just, you go, "Oh, okay, they str- they're straining credibility a little here. It's a little extra." But this is actually real.

It's unbelievable. The hypothetical was the explosion in the lab, correct? Or it's not-

Annie Jacobsen: Actually quite the opposite because the reason I chose that as the inciting incident is because there was an actual explosion-

Jordan Harbinger: Really? ...

Annie Jacobsen: at the Vector

Jordan Harbinger: lab. Okay. So I wrote this down and I was like, "Ask if it's a hypothetical, just a very realistic one."

So there was an explosion in a biolab?

Annie Jacobsen: In 2019, there was an explosion at Vector, at the BSL-4 lab- Oh my

Jordan Harbinger: gosh ...

Annie Jacobsen: in Siberia, in Russia. And allegedly, no pathogens were released because allegedly the explosion occurred in a building where pathogens weren't [01:12:00] stored. But that is not the case in the scenario that you're right.

Right.

Jordan Harbinger: So just luckily, the place where all the pathogens were stored wasn't the building that blew up. Buildings are not typically supposed to spontaneously explode. Do we even know what caused the explosion?

Annie Jacobsen: I think they blamed it on a gas leak.

Jordan Harbinger: Of course they did. You

Annie Jacobsen: know? But Vector is a very big facility.

I mean, look, if you want to see a big facility, look at the BSL-4 lab in Fort Detrick. That is just one of many labs on that campus. So the facilities where biological research takes place, sure, they can be very small. I went to a BSL-3 lab, by the way, in an office building that looked a lot like the office building we are in, and it was just a few miles from Orlando Airport.

Wow. Wow. Okay. That's a BSL-4 lab... 3 lab where you can work with anthrax and plague. BSL-4 labs are high containment facilities, and they have different sets of where they can be. But [01:13:00] nonetheless, they are often located right in the middle of a city with millions of people.

Jordan Harbinger: What was the lab in Wuhan? Do we know which one, what level that was?

Annie Jacobsen: That's a terrific question. I mean, some will tell you it was a BSL-3 lab, but others will say it was a BSL-2 lab.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Annie Jacobsen: And there are photographs that you can look at where you see the lab in disarray with very few safety protocols. So that's a- Yikes ... whole other discussion.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's scary. It's a totally different show, but I'm so curious what the safeguards are on 3.

Maybe 4, it's classified and you're not even supposed to know. I don't know. But obviously airlocks, but what else? I mean, I j- I'm just... My imagination's

Annie Jacobsen: running wild. A BSL-4 lab, like you think about, you know, the submarine airlock system, right? Yeah. Like you... That is... You have to go through double doors. The scientists are taking a chemical bath before- Yeah

they step out. They're wearing suits where if there is a cut, the air goes [01:14:00] out, not in. Right. What

Jordan Harbinger: are th- Was that called positive pressure? Yeah, they get sprayed, and then they've got to take the suit off, and then I don't... But I don't know. It's just, it's so interesting to me, like what sort of safeguards are there?

Because whatever it is, it's not enough, right? Whatever it is , it's not enough to keep these things out.

Annie Jacobsen: I have a statistic on that that will not make you sleep well.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: And first of all, there is no government organization, either in the United States or internationally, that is keeping track of all the BSL-4 and BSL-3 labs.

We, the public, relies upon the good work of academics and scientists, whom I credit and source in the book- Please ... if anyone wants more information.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Annie Jacobsen: Here's their statistic. There are 3,500 or more BSL-3 labs around the world, 91.6% of which have no safety standards.

Jordan Harbinger: So how does it have a safety classification but no safety standard?

Annie Jacobsen: There's no safety standards.

Jordan Harbinger: So they're just working on things that should be protected under biosafety lab level [01:15:00] three, but they just didn't bother doing that.

Annie Jacobsen: Exactly. Wow. Well, those are the pathogens that- Right ... they're supposed to be able to be working on.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. You know? So they got smallpox and it's like, "Hey, this should be BSL-3," and they go, "Whatever, we wash our hands when we're done."

Annie Jacobsen: Precisely.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.

Annie Jacobsen: There are no specific protocols. And the BSL-4 labs are really interesting and worrisome because before 9/11, actually in the late '90s, there were two BSL-4 labs in the United States of America. Two only. One at Fort Detrick, which is the Defense Department's only BSL-4 lab, and the other in Atlanta at the CDC.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Annie Jacobsen: After 9/11, there was an explosion, no pun intended-

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah ...

Annie Jacobsen: of BSL-3 and 4 labs, to the point where we now have 15 and another two are under construction, so 17. And that is what has just been sourced by the scientists and academics. So that is essentially the figure that the public has.

Jordan Harbinger: Right, so if the military has made other secret ones, we just don't even know about those.

[01:16:00] Why, uh, is there such an increase? I mean, is it just because now we can edit genes more easily, so pharma's getting into the game? Or what, what, what's the reason?

Annie Jacobsen: It's tied very specifically to the war on terror. It's tied to 9/11, to the anthrax attacks.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

Annie Jacobsen: It's tied to the Bush-Cheney administration.

Dick Cheney himself was terrified of a biological weapons attack. I write about this in other of my books. And so after 9/11, there began a buildup of a new industry, the biodefense technological military industrial complex. There was an extraordinary amount of money that suddenly got pumped into this, most of it happening behind closed doors because most of it was classified.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's kind of a double-edged sword, right? Oh, good, we're bringing attention to this. We're bringing pressure. There's funding now. Okay, great, now instead of two labs, we have 17. It's like, oh, that's not exactly what [01:17:00] I was hoping for.

Annie Jacobsen: And the reason that I point this out is not necessarily to bring, you know, self-righteous indignation to the table of my, at the feet of my own government-

Jordan Harbinger: Right

Annie Jacobsen: but rather those are the facts, and what happened as a result, which I think speaks a bit to our discussion on measures and countermeasures and offense, defense, and paranoia and your enemies and adversaries wondering what you're doing, th- what was happening in the United States had a ripple effect around the world.

Suddenly all these other countries from China to India-

Jordan Harbinger: Sure ...

Annie Jacobsen: they're all in the game now, and they are saying, "America is doing this. We must do it, too." And that is why now today there are 110 BSL-4 labs in 34 countries around the world, some of which are at war with their neighbors.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure, so Pakistan and India kind of situation.

Annie Jacobsen: And when you're thinking that there's, like, kinetic explosions going off, that, you know, [01:18:00] certain areas of said city is under the control of rogue bad guy, it's really raising a lot of concern about the safety and security of what's in that lab.

Jordan Harbinger: Especially when you realize that the BSL-4 is just the classification of the pathogens in the lab, not the level of safety that the lab actually has.

It's the level of safety it's supposed to have. Yes. That's really scary.

Annie Jacobsen: Yes, and you have to believe that in many countries, certainly in more modern countries, scientists that are working there are seriously concerned about their own health and safety, and so they would, one would presume, be very, you know, adamant about having proper gear.

But in other labs, the BSL-2 labs and 3 labs in countries that are not as scientifically advanced or experienced with this kind of research, you can run into a problem with a lack of knowledge.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure, e- [01:19:00] especially if it's maybe an authoritarian regime. What's the scientist going to say? "Hey, look, I'm not going to work under these conditions.

My hazmat suit has a puncture hole in it." They're going to say, "Here's a roll of duct tape, comrade. Get after it. We got work to do." You know? They're... You can't just go work for a competing lab.

Annie Jacobsen: That is a wonderfully terrifying point.

Jordan Harbinger: Imagine earning a PhD in molecular biology

only to spend four hours wandering around outside in the winter in pajamas so American spy satellites think your bioweapons lab is a psychiatric hospital.

Your parents must be thrilled. We'll be right back.

Come check out our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser. It is specific and practical. It'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology, relationships in under two minutes just about every Wednesday. Actually, that's kind of a lie. It's, uh, ev- it's often on Wednesdays. How's that? And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

It's a great companion to the show. Jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Now

for the rest of my conversation with Annie Jacobsen.

So [01:20:00] you're advising the pr- this is a hypothetical as well. You're advising the president. We know a BSL Level 4 lab has an explosion, little gas leak in air quotes, but we don't know what escaped.

What are the first five questions we should be asking?

Annie Jacobsen: You mean what is the intelligence community and the Defense Department- Right ... been doing in those moments immediately after

Jordan Harbinger: it? Yeah, essentially

Annie Jacobsen: that. Yes. And I take the reader through precisely that because it's profoundly interesting. Only later do we learn that the Defense Department only takes the lead in the initial investigation, and then has to let U.S.

Department of Health and Human Services take over, which is its own set of problems.

Jen Harbinger: Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: But initially, it's really the work of the intelligence community that is looking at the facility from space, looking at the facility from the ground where there may be covert sensors using signals intelligence, imagery intelligence, satellite images, trying to discern if a pathogen got out, and then [01:21:00] what pathogen got out.

And you learn, as I take readers through this in kind of the first act of the narrative, that this is a complex and really frustrating journey because unlike nuclear weapons where you know that's an ICBM, there's a nuclear weapon in the warhead, essentially, you don't know, and there are so many different pathogens.

And so you have all these different components of the government working to try and determine what it is, and at the same time, in the United States, you have the President's Biodefense Council, now beefed up because of COVID, working overtime to try to figure out when are we going to brief the president.

Jordan Harbinger: So you have to figure out what organism was maybe present there, and if it was breached. And I suppose there's some pretty bleak options, right? Because you have to go, okay, is the foreign government responding in a way that we think is honest. You know, because if Russia says, "We had an explosion at a BSL Level 4 lab.

We're going to be honest, guys. There's some pretty gross stuff in there. Heads up," right? Like, "Chernobyl exploded. We're [01:22:00] not trying to hide this anymore. We're not giving you propaganda numbers. There was some re- research stuff in there that looks a lot like smallpox or hantavirus but way more contagious. We don't think anything got out.

We're working on it," that's one thing. But if they go, "Gas leak, no problem. It was just the cafeteria," and the intelligence agency says, "That was not the cafeteria. We've seen liquid nitrogen trucks going in and out of there. We've seen all kinds of stuff going in. They're lying to us," what do we do? Do we drop a tactical nuke on the whole facility and anything around it?

I mean, we have to sort of decide what we're going to do. Are we going to start World War III over this because it could kill everybody anyway or, or what? And y- that might not even work if you wait too long to make the decision, right?

Annie Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the precise read on precisely what happens-

Jordan Harbinger: Okay ...

Annie Jacobsen: in the book, which by the way, comes to me from different sources in the field who have explained to me exactly as you describe it in a little bit longer form.

And yes, once the president convenes, once the SecDef is there presenting [01:23:00] options, once you learn very quickly in the scenario that I write that Russia is essentially gaslighting everybody. Like, no, no, no, not even responding, which often happens in these situations when something illegal is going on Then you have the SecDef in the scenario I write bring to the table the idea of using a nuclear weapon against a biological weapons facility.

And again, this is not from Annie's imagination. This is an actual program that existed in the late 1990s and was revived during the Bush-Cheney administration, the details of which were leaked to The Washington Post. And I take readers through what that looks like. Now, we don't know if in 2026 this is still a viable program, but I have a strong feeling that it probably is.

And then it would be classified under something called a PEAD, a Presidential Emergency Action [01:24:00] Directive, which would allow for nuclear use against a biological weapons facility. Now, people may say, "Why not just put a couple 2,000-pound bombs on it?" And the reason is very-

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. We want some heat, right?

Annie Jacobsen: You want incineration because 2,000-pound bombs, the, as the science reveals, the blast wave would likely push the pathogens out into the atmosphere, whereas a nuclear weapon with its extreme temperatures would incinerate everything before it had a chance to be pushed out.

Jordan Harbinger: Whoever's designing this is, they've got their work cut out for them, right? And, and making a decision like this would be so hard because you would almost have to say, "Look, Russia, we think you're lying about this. We're going to drop a tactical nuke on you. We're not trying to start a war. We just want to contain this, and we don't believe that you're doing a good job."

Imagine how that's going to go over with the Russian government.

Annie Jacobsen: Of course, and, you know, my understanding from having looked at a lot of this, if I had to speculate here, would [01:25:00] be that would be one level of consideration were it a biological weapons facility in, you know, said nation with a terrorist organization as having a host country.

That would be w- or maybe even a North Korea situation. Probably not because they have nukes, but as soon as you're considering using a nuclear weapon against a biological weapons facility inside a nuclear-armed nation, that's endgame right there because we know no matter how nuclear use begins, it ends only one way.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Annie Jacobsen: In total annihilation.

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, you would almost have to say, "Either you put a tactical nuke on it or we are going to," and North Korea says, "We c- we don't have the capability to do it. Go ahead, but we're going to protest about it and make a big deal about it, but we, uh, d- we're not trying to kill everyone."

I mean, how do you even begin to, like, n- negotiate that particular scenario? I mean, that's actually totally insane to think about.

Annie Jacobsen: Which is why you need to be having these conversations before. You need to be having these conversations [01:26:00] now.

Jordan Harbinger: I do not envy the people who have to put their you know what on the line and make a decision like this.

That's just absolutely. This brinkmanship is just crazy to me.

Annie Jacobsen: In my experience interviewing so many of these individuals who are dedicated public servants, who've been working on counter non, you know, proliferation their whole lives, they have brilliant minds and great ideas and possible solutions that are not based in drop a nuke on it.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a relief, I suppose.

Annie Jacobsen: Yes. That are based in diplomacy, that are based in let's revisit certain treaties. But, you know, these individuals, as they explained to me, they can only get so far. Another one of the problems is always that you've got adminis- These efforts take years, and administrations change, and suddenly they have a whole new idea about bio or about nuclear, which is why I believe the United Nations is so important, and I think it's so distressing to see the [01:27:00] United Nations...

And by the way, the WHO is a component of the United Nations. It's very distressing to me to see these international organizations lose their stature in the world in which we live today because I think we need these outside international, allegedly non-political organizations to be leading the charge on behalf of everyone.

Jordan Harbinger: Here in the States, if we have an outbreak like that, I think a lot of people will go, "All right, we just have to send a few thousand people as soon as they get symptoms into the hospitals that can contain it." And then you wrote about how many beds we have for these kinds of things, and it's like 100 for some, and for the most severe stuff, it's like two.

Annie Jacobsen: That's right. These special pathogen suites are required for patients with what's called a tier one select agent airborne disease like pneumonic plague This is where, by the way, those who were [01:28:00] on the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak situation, many of them were taken to these special pathogen suites.

Jordan Harbinger: Was that airborne, by the way? I don't even know anything about hantavirus.

Annie Jacobsen: Hantavirus was very complex because it's transmissible through... It's fluid transmissible, so if you spit on someone- Okay ... you know, and then you wipe your, the spit and you by accident put it in your nose or your eye- Oof ... or your mouth, now you're talking you could have the disease.

It is not airborne. True airborne is aerosolized.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. But

Annie Jacobsen: you're just one sneeze away. It can float in the air.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, okay.

Annie Jacobsen: And you're one sneeze away, and there was a lot of unknown, uncertainty around that strain of hantavirus, whether or not it was something called the Andes strain, of which there's only been one or two scientific papers written that I know of that suggest maybe it could be airborne.

So this was a lot of unknowns. I actually followed that pretty closely- I bet ... and felt like- I bet, yeah ... the WHO did a responsible job in tracking that. It's a longer conversation, but the special pathogen suites are essentially like a mini [01:29:00] bio safety fortress. Mm-hmm. And there are only about 100 beds in the entire United States of America-

Jordan Harbinger: Gosh

Annie Jacobsen: in a country for 340 million people. And so one of the things I learned very quickly in, in reporting this is that the medical facilities in America become overwhelmed on day one.

Jordan Harbinger: Because if you're on a plane and you spread it to everyone on the plane, now there's 400% m- or whatever more patients than we have beds for just landing in SFO or w- And

Annie Jacobsen: those people- Right

disperse because they don't know that they're ill.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. Yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: And there was so much to learn about, for example, what a super spreader event is. Mm-hmm. You know? Yeah. A term that kind of only came out- Right ... and came into the public consciousness because of COVID. But a super spreader event, there's no metric agreed upon about what it exactly is required.

Right. The metric that is scientists use is kind of based on COVID, it was times four. So in other words, [01:30:00] the transmissibility of a pathogen is very important. If it's airborne, if it's fluid transmissible, or if it's like Ebola that it's in the other room, you're not going to get it, or if there's a dead-end host, like in anthrax.

There's those components. But then there's also how contagious is it? So that's called the R nought or the R zero.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I remember learning about this, yeah.

Annie Jacobsen: And the most transmissible, with an R nought of maybe even 18, again, all these are approximate, is measles. Another one that's super contagious, chicken pox.

It has an R nought of 12. COVID had an R nought of about 2.5. When it mutated into the Delta variant, it was about five. So what that means is each person is going to infect 2.5 more people, or in the case of chicken pox, 12 more people. So you s- you kind of get the idea.

Jordan Harbinger: This was explained on this show, again, I think by Rob Reid, where he said something like it was...

Eh, he did a better job, and it's been years. But it was like if you walk into an elevator and somebody [01:31:00] had COVID in there right before you, you're probably not going to get it. But if somebody took the elevator and they had measles, and then you went to lunch and came back and went in that same elevator, you might actually get measles.

And it was like just whatever analogy he used was very scary. So something that has an R nought of 18 or whatever it is, is just, you're just infecting a z- gazillion people with it.

Annie Jacobsen: And with a super spreader event-

Jordan Harbinger: Right ...

Annie Jacobsen: you multiply the R nought times four. So if COVID was 2.5, in a super spreader event like the Diamond Princess cruise, which is what we now know how COVID spread outside of China, that was the first super spreader event.

And I interviewed the number two at HHS at the time, Admiral Brett Giroir, who was in charge of rescuing, sending two epidemiologists in hazmat suits to rescue the 300 and some odd Americans on that ship after they got out of quarantine.

Jordan Harbinger: Crazy.

Annie Jacobsen: And the super spreader [01:32:00] component was that it was times four.

So what ended up happening, because everybody was self-contained on the ship, one original patient with COVID, with the SARS-CoV-2 virus in his lungs- Ended up infecting 712 other passengers

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my gosh

Annie Jacobsen: Many of whom disembarked in Hong Kong, a city of 7.5 million people

Jordan Harbinger: Holy moly. I mean, it's, when you think about this, it just seems impossible to stop anything like this from happening

Annie Jacobsen: It is impossible to stop Yes Unless you get it in the first 12 to 24 hours.

Again, the reason why communication is so important. You're, you know, when you were telling me, replaying the scenario to me, if you did call Moscow in a situation like this, or if Moscow called the United States and said, "Look, we have a real problem. This happened. We need help." I mean, I spoke to military commanders who would say, "We would deploy soldiers immediately to [01:33:00] help."

Now, sure, that's easy to say in an ideal world- Right ... and Russia would never go for it because they would believe it was some kind of a sneak intent-

Jordan Harbinger: Sure,

Annie Jacobsen: yeah ... to get information to hold against them

Jordan Harbinger: The paranoia is real. I, I had, uh, Jonna Mendez on the show. She was... Do you know who that is? She worked for, uh, CIA Head of Disguise, but it was, like, in the '80s when she worked in Moscow.

Annie Jacobsen: Yes, yes, Argo. The Argo

Jordan Harbinger: story. She... Yes Yes So her husband organized that. Um, and she said that one day they had, I think, a fire at the US Embassy in Moscow, and they were like, "Well, we..." Obviously you call the fire department, and the CIA people were like, "No. You can call the fire department, but we're not letting them on at, whatever, the fifth floor."

So they were in there with an actual fire, throwing documents into another fire, which is, you know, their incinerator. And then she said the fire department that showed up all had, like, brand-new boots, brand-new equipment, no- totally non- untouched everything, and some of the guys looked pretty out of shape, and she was like, "This is not the fire department.

This is the KGB."

Annie Jacobsen: Touche.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah [01:34:00] Right? And so is, but, like, I get it- Yes ... because we would do the same thing.

Annie Jacobsen: Yes. That's that degree of paranoia. Yeah. And of course, paranoia plays a major theme in this book because that is a hallmark of Soviet Cold War thinking, and to my eye, that lingers. And it has also kind of infected the United States.

Whether or not that's intentional or just a byproduct, I don't know. But when people refer to conspiracy theorists, which I prefer to call, you know, alternative people who think in wildly alternative narratives- Yeah ... there is often a degree of paranoia underpinning that. Now, what's the saying? It's, if it's real, it's not paranoia.

Jordan Harbinger: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to

Annie Jacobsen: get you. Yes. Right, is that- So there is that. Yeah, yeah. You know, you want to have healthy... It's not even skepticism. What would be the word? You want to have a healthy mistrust balanced [01:35:00] with a desire to trust.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

Annie Jacobsen: The old Reagan adage. You know, trust, then verify.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. So let's suppose the pathogen kills a bunch of, a, a, a couple billion people. Unfortunately, a lot of the people who are left are, sorry, but a bunch of politicians and the people who live in the woods and don't trust anyone already. That's a rough kernel to rebuild civilization. That's a rough start to the new humanity.

Annie Jacobsen: Yes. You know, in Nuclear War, I end the book with a section on nuclear winter. And again, sounds like science fiction, but totally science fact, and I had the great fortune of interviewing one of the last remaining original authors on the nuclear winter theory with Carl Sagan. His name is Professor Brian Toon.

He's still working on nuclear winter. In looking at biological war, there is no nuclear winter version of that on the books, and so I wrote something called Biological Twilight where I imagined, it's the one part of the book that is speculatively [01:36:00] about the future of what the world would look like literally after time passes, the kind of stage that you're referring to.

And one of the conclusions I came to was, and this also has to do with having looked at contemporary writings from the 14th century, the Black Death, the actual bubonic plague epidemic, pneumonic plague epidemic, pandemic. Who would be left Would be mostly male because a lot of the survivors in the United States would be military.

The Pentagon has issued 1.7 gas mask full respirators to military personnel. You would most definitely need one of those to keep yourself from inhaling genetically modified airborne plague in the scenario I write. And the US military has only 17% women. So now you're talking about mostly men, and you're also talking about a world that is filled with, you know, Machiavellian type-

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah

Annie Jacobsen: psychopaths and [01:37:00] solipsists, people who would be willing to kill someone from a distance because they think, "I can't have anyone around me."

Jordan Harbinger: Sure. "

Annie Jacobsen: They might infect me."

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Annie Jacobsen: That is a very dark and grim world.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's some Mad Max type of stuff right there. Really, really crazy. So okay, let's wrap with something possibly slightly optimistic.

If you could force governments and the scientific community to make one change tomorrow that would, well, attempt to reduce the chance of this scenario ever happening, what would it be?

Annie Jacobsen: On a practical level, I don't think there is a single magic button. I think it's a long, deliberate, and whole of government effort to devise a list of priorities of what has to happen.

You know, certainly the current administration stopping gain of function research until more is known is, in my eye, a very solid move in the right direction because that is making, it's drawing a line in the sand also for other nations to follow. So [01:38:00] there's that. And then there is, you know, and this is probably because I'm in the business of dialogue, I'm in the business of conveying information, of communicating with my fellows.

I think there must be an effort to depoliticize the threats of weapons of mass destruction, both nuclear and bio.

Jordan Harbinger: You said, or you wrote, I should say, that there are scenarios that are far worse than the one in the book. Without giving anybody a blueprint, what is the category of threat that you deliberately chose not to put on the page?

Annie Jacobsen: Most certainly AI-enabled biological threats. I see. You know, that is something that the presidential advisors that I interviewed are very concerned about. And interestingly, over the past year, as I was kind of winding down my research, really focusing on the reporting, and then even moving into production when I'm still doing interviews so that I could prepare for dialogues like this, the threat of AI systems mixed with biology has [01:39:00] grown dramatically in my discussions with people to the point now where it is an actual major topic of discussion.

I was invited to a Q&A at DARPA's summer session with its BSAT organization, that's the Biological Science and Technology Study Group, that's a bunch of Nobel laureates based out of Caltech, just last week. And I was participating in obviously an unclassified component of their work. But on the table, and heavily discussed with a very serious sort of fear factor built in, and I do not say that lightly, was the threat of biology and computational systems with the human in the loop losing control of the ability to control the AIs as far as bio is concerned.

Jordan Harbinger: So what would that look like? The AI just decides, "I'm going to make a weapon," and we can't do anything about it?

Annie Jacobsen: That is exactly what it would look like.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Annie Jacobsen: And this is DARPA talking. And by [01:40:00] the way, the solution is even more haunting, I learned. Again, not classified. The hurdle is that the six individual CEOs who are running the world's AI companies have to, to the Defense Department's eye, be persuaded to agree. To actual quote, "Pull the plug on bio plus AI."

And so that really threw me because being someone who essentially wrote the book on DARPA called The Pentagon's Brain, I was a Pulitzer finalist for it, this was in 2015. I can no longer say that based on listening to the s- DARPA scientists themselves, in essence saying, the CEOs of these AI companies have more control than we do.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's really scary. So you're actually going to be speaking with a group of senators on this exact topic in the next few days. I mean, we had to rearrange this so that it could happen, so tell me [01:41:00] about that.

Annie Jacobsen: That's right, and maybe I'll report back in. We'll do another- Sure ... podcast on. But what's interesting is I am a journalist, I am a storyteller.

I am going to the Senate to talk to senators about What I write about in my book, Nuclear War. And you know, the general public may be saying, "My God, what good can she do? I mean, aren't these guys really supposed to be in charge of, of what's going on here?"

Jordan Harbinger: We all saw the Facebook thing where they didn't know how the internet worked, so you're, you're they need your expertise.

Annie Jacobsen: But I think this is an interesting and, you know, it's sort of like a, it's positive in an enigmatic way. When I was asked to speak at the United Nations about nuclear weapons, I was truly speaking to the world's subject matter experts because these were all the individuals that are responsible for trying to get us back into the treaties or in this new treaty, the TPNW, that's on the table.

And one of the leading diplomats said to me at a small reception afterwards, he said, "Annie, thank you for doing what we subject matter experts forgot to do, which is make [01:42:00] this subject easy to understand." And so that gives me hope that you need subject matter experts with their high-level understanding of systems of systems, of weapons of mass destructions, but you also need the storyteller like me to perhaps bring it home- I

Jordan Harbinger: think so

Annie Jacobsen: in a very easy way. And so I am going to the Senate, and then I am going to the White House at the behest of HHS to bring them some books at their request, Biological War as Scenario, so that they can get a jump on reading it.

Jordan Harbinger: Hopefully they do. Uh, and hopefully they lose enough sleep over it like I did, but actually are able to do something about it.

That would make me rest a little bit easier. Is the final failure of human imagination that we could not foresee this, or that we foresaw it perfectly, in fact, and just continued anyway?

Annie Jacobsen: I think the latter because I think having lived through COVID, we all now know that a pandemic [01:43:00] actually can just happen.

It seemed to have come out of the blue. But that no longer should be the ostrich head in the sand approach because we know better.

Jordan Harbinger: Annie Jacobsen, thank you very ... That's, well, again, people even just listening to this are going to have a little bit of trouble falling asleep tonight. I do recommend the book. I think it's a good read.

And I jokingly say that it'll make you nervous. I think it's an informative and fun read. Uh, it will make you a little nervous, but I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing. I think people should be thinking about this. Even if you, quote-unquote, "can't do anything about it," I think it's good to have this even in the back burner of your brain because it's a hell of a lot more likely than nuclear winter.

Annie Jacobsen: The point is pressure, not panic.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right. Thank you.

Annie Jacobsen: Thank you.

Jordan Harbinger: What could happen if humans mess with genes and if labs leak super bugs? In this clip, Rob Reid chats about DNA printers that could either save us or, well, not, by churning out vaccines or viruses right from our living rooms.

The terrifying thing is [01:44:00] COVID is pretty damn benign compared to what could have easily happened this time around or what could very easily happen next time around, particularly if the next bug is maliciously designed.

Society produces a certain small but terrifying percentage of people every year who, for whatever reason, go to such a dark place that they become suicidal mass murderers, and their death toll is limited only by the weapons that they have. Technology is the force multiplier. The 1918 flu virus, which killed at a much, much, much greater scale than COVID, and the smallpox genome, both of those are online, and anybody could find them within a short number of minutes.

The time would soon come where somebody could take that and reanimate that. And something which scares the bejesus out of me, which is an influenza virus, not a coronavirus, is H5N1 flu. It kills 50 to 60% of the people that it [01:45:00] infects. Two independent research groups, one in Holland and one in Wisconsin, took it upon themselves, and they basically made it capable of aerosolized transmission through the breath.

No lab is secure enough to keep this stuff from getting out. Right. And this is a pathogen that could quite literally topple civilization if it's contagious enough. If the lights shut off on a countrywide basis, after a shockingly small number of days, civilization starts to teeter and eventually topple.

For more things that'll keep you up at night and whether we can handle the power we're playing with, check out episode 510 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Annie Jacobsen's new book is Biological War. It'll be linked in the show notes. Please use those links on the website if you buy the books from our guests.

It really does help support the show. A lot of people go, "The link is not in the show notes." Yes, it is. The show notes is not the little blurb in your app. It's on the website at jordanharbinger.com. Anyway, this is scary stuff, huh? America [01:46:00] has roughly 100 high-level isolation beds for more than 340 million people.

So what? Once patient 101 arrives, we, we unfold the plague cot and put it next to the vending machine? What, what happens then? After researching this book, Annie, she purchased respirators, protective suits, emergency supplies. I bought a case of bourbon and changed my Netflix password. I don't know. Maybe I still have some work to do here.

But a biological catastrophe would not actually require society to stop functioning. That's kind of the, the, the spooky part here. It would use our functioning society, airports, hospitals, technology, compassion, and distrust to spread itself. And the most disturbing possibility of all may not be that we failed to foresee such a disaster.

It may be that we foresaw it in extraordinary detail, ran the simulations, documented all the failures, and then just continued on exactly as before. All things Annie Jacobsen will be in the show notes on the website. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals.

Please [01:47:00] consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm @JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in scenarios like these, war games, biological threats, or just a little bit of sci-fi that might not be sci-fi, unfortunately, definitely share this episode with them.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.