Transcript of Annie Jacobsen Interview: Biological Warfare on Shawn Ryan Show #323

It can also be an incident. So a lab leak is—

SHAWN RYAN: Sounds familiar.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: A very, very high threat level situation for everybody. So again, it’s like information, not panic. Pressure, pressure to learn more.

Nuclear War vs. Biological War: Which Is Worse?

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, what would you rather go through, a nuclear war scenario or a biological pathogen that— okay, first of all, that could be a long, slow, painful death. I mean, so I guess so could nuclear war if you weren’t in the blast zone.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: One of the biggest takeaways that readers came back at me with after reading Nuclear War: A Scenario was, “I just want to die in the immediate blast,” because it’s like that Nikita Khrushchev quote, “The survivors would envy the dead.” In many ways, bio has that same component. Probably because of what you said, that you just think of having this long, slow, painful death.

But the reality I learned when researching and reporting this book is actually a little bit more frightening. In Nuclear War, I take readers from nuclear launch to nuclear winter in 72 minutes. 72 minutes, not days, minutes. That’s how fast it could happen according to StratCom.

In Biological War, I take the readers from outbreak to anarchy in 6 days, because anarchy and insurrection is the real threat. And that was shocking to learn, again, from the Defense Department. You’re talking about in the homeland — anarchy, insurrection. A common phrase I came across when looking at declassified documents was, “Fear of infection will send America spiraling into anarchy and insurrection.” Fear of infection. There’s just something so visceral about this idea of being infected.

Understanding the Basics of Biological Threats

SHAWN RYAN: Do you prepare for this kind of stuff? I mean, what does your house look like?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: What is my house? A bunker?

SHAWN RYAN: What? You got a bunker?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: No, I just have a house. I mean, call me naive, but I just really think man-made problems, man-made solution. And that’s the optimist in me. But it is really helpful to know what you’re up against.

Want me to give you the 3 basic ideas of bio to understand? Because sometimes I write for everybody — just give it to me so I can understand it. Those are the questions I ask the smartest people in the room, and it’s what I try to convey. Because if you’re too knowledgeable on a subject, sometimes you lose your audience.

We all lived through the COVID pandemic, so whenever you’re talking about a biological incident, 3 things. How might I get it? That’s transmissibility. How deadly is it? COVID had a 1% death rate — 1 out of 100 people died. Flu, 0.1%. Third thing is, is there something I can take that will heal me? That’s called a medical countermeasure.

3 basic components. And so through all of modern history, Defense Department planning against biological war has been like looking at those 3 and creating lists of fears around them.

When people don’t know any of that, the fear— for example, your tick situation. A tick is called a vector-borne disease, so it has to bite you for you to be infected. The most deadly threat is an airborne pathogen, and that’s what COVID was. Something that can be breathed in, something that can linger in the room — that’s a real problem.

And that’s the scenario I take readers through, an airborne pathogen, because that is what all of government fears. It’s unstoppable. The weapon essentially becomes the human lung. The weapon’s delivery system becomes the human lungs.

Another really interesting thing I learned about all this was that the uncertainty idea is so huge in public health. Remember when COVID happened? For the first 3 months, the CDC, who is in charge, and the WHO, who’s kind of in charge internationally, were sending out tweets that said, “COVID not airborne.” N-O-T in big letters. I reprint one of their tweets in the book.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: “COVID not airborne.” It was airborne. It was airborne. And instead of admitting they were wrong, or even out of the gate saying, “Look, we don’t know” — because they didn’t know — to insist otherwise then creates this kind of spiraling mistrust. Hence your opening question about trust.

DNA, Bioweapons, and Targeted Assassination

SHAWN RYAN: Just going through the outline and stuff, it brought a lot of stuff to mind. We’ll get into the book here in just a second. But if you looked at ancestry.com or any of these biometrics companies — and who owns them? — they could take your DNA that you paid to have tested and create a bioweapon specifically designed to assassinate you?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Absolutely. Individual targets are a whole other dirty game. And historically, that has been going on for a very long time. The Soviets had huge assassination programs specifically creating biopoisons. Poisoning is like one of the oldest assassination ruses in the world.

I mean, there was an al-Qaeda guy that got assassinated — I want to say before the War on Terror, he was in Kosovo, I believe. Katab was his last name. And he opened up a letter, and somehow licked it or closed the letter, and there was poison on it and he died. So there are these very specific assassinations that way.

What I think is the really big threat is what the Defense Department calls, what FEMA calls, what HHS — our Health and Human Services — calls, because bio is a multi-agency event, which is even more complex and threatening. Now you’re talking about multiple agencies and stovepiping.

You have pathogens that can be genetically modified to your point to become airborne. So let me say one thing, because the pathogen thing can kind of be like, “What the hell is that?” Viruses and bacteria are both pathogens. Germs are everywhere. We have germs in our stomachs. Germs are not necessarily bad. When you call it a pathogen, that means it can be deadly.

COVID was a virus. Plague, which I use as the pathogen in my book scenario, is a bacteria. Plague was a bioweapon of yesteryear because a medical countermeasure was invented to fight it — it’s a bacteria, so antibiotics kill the plague.

Now with genetic modification, you can tweak the plague pathogen, which is called Yersinia pestis, so that it is immune to the antibiotics. That’s where we’re into some very sinister genetic modifications that most people don’t know about, don’t want to know about, but probably should know a little bit about — because it helps you know what you’re up against.

The Threat of Bioweapons and Government Planning

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SHAWN RYAN: I mean, it’s scary. It’s just, from what I understand, it’s a lot, a lot cheaper to produce a bioweapon, a lot easier to sneak it in the country, a lot easier to get it released. I mean, I don’t— I’m not a scientist or anything, but you see all the things that are being created right now. The direwolf, the woolly mammoth supposedly is coming back. We had Charles Hoskinson on, who’s one of the scientists. Have you heard about the plants that they’re developing? They’re big. They’re making bioluminescent plants that can glow whatever color they want, which is amazing.

You know, some of the uses— I mean, he was saying you could put these plants around a nuclear power plant or whatever, and if there’s any radiation leaking, then the plants will glow red. And he showed me pictures of what these things look like. We couldn’t put it on the episode because it was so early on. But I mean, it’s like something you would see in that movie The Avatar.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: It’s like science fiction except for it’s science fact.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, it’s real.

Dual Use: The Double-Edged Sword of Genetic Modification

ANNIE JACOBSEN: And this is, when you’re talking about these kind of modifications to Mother Nature, it brings up this idea, which I think is super important and is kind of at the heart of all of this debate, discussion, science moving forward, which is dual use. So yes, if you’re able to create plants that can detect radiation leakage, that’s another form of an intelligence vehicle like what’s called MASINT. You know, like we have sniffer technology, we can test sewer water, we can see explosions from space. That’s signals intelligence. So measurement and signature intelligence called MASINT would be the plants. And that would be terrific for us because it’s a way of understanding what an adversary is up to.

In the biomedical world, the reason you have genetic modification, the reason this all began— and by the way, it was kind of discovered, invented in 1971 in a lab in California at Stanford, genetic modification. So the idea of those scientists, they certainly weren’t weapons engineers. They were like, we’re going to be able to create incredible medical countermeasures in the same way that penicillin itself was a medical countermeasure and stopped infection. You know, so many soldiers died in World War II because of wound infection. Penicillin comes along. Fantastic. You’ve knocked out so many bacteria deaths. So that’s the idea if you’re a doctor, if you’re trying to do good in the world or trying to kind of keep the world in balance.

But the other side of dual use is weaponizing something. And one of the original sort of components I saw after I wrote Nuclear War, and I was like, am I really going to touch bio? And I had had many sources saying to me, “Annie, you’ve got to write about it because it’s more threatening.” There’s a threat spectrum diagram that I found, an unclassified version of it, in looking through the Defense Department documents. And it shows all the weapons of mass destruction on a scale. And of course, nuclear weapons are at the worst end because they are the most destructive. But bioweapons are considered by the Defense Department the greatest overall threat.

SHAWN RYAN: Really?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Greatest overall threat. That is shocking. That needs to be discussed. And it’s because the bar for entry is so low. Think about what— think about we’ve had nuclear technology for 80 years now, weapons technology. There’s an incredibly high bar for entry. You can’t just make a nuclear bomb in your basement. Bioweapons. People will now tell you that a high school student with limited biology can essentially do some genetic tweaks to create this kind of thing. So the access— absolutely. That sounds alarmist. It’s true. That is like worthy of a discussion in and of itself.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s basically everybody. Everybody.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Yeah. High school students compete in sort of science courses doing genetic tweaks.

SHAWN RYAN: I had no idea. High school’s come a long way since I was—

ANNIE JACOBSEN: I was dissecting frogs, not doing genetic modifications. Wow. Wow.

Inspiration Behind the Book: Near-Extinction Level Events

SHAWN RYAN: So where do we start today? Where do you want to start?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Where do you want to start?

SHAWN RYAN: What was your inspiration? Your original inspiration?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Yeah. Oh God, what a funny word, right? I mean, inspiration for writing a book about the end of the world. The fact that biological war is considered a near-extinction level event. That’s the nomenclature, a near ELE. But I think, inspiration— I am a storyteller. I am really interested in telling a dramatic narrative. I want people to read what I write. And it’s not necessarily meant to terrify them, but maybe to put pressure on government people.

But the most shocking part about it for me was that there are plans in place, like nuclear war. There are plans in place for this kind of a near-extinction-level event, which— spoiler alert on the end of this book where I take the readers through outbreak to anarchy in 6 days. What happens after anarchy is an actual government plan called devolution. Devolution, pronounced 2 different ways depending on who’s saying it. Evolution with a D in front of it. It’s exactly like you would think. Devolution is going back. So it’s a government plan. The name devolution is unclassified. The program is classified.

I had the man who signed off on the last version of it take me right up— Obama’s FEMA director, Craig Fugate— take me, take readers, right up to the edge of what can legally be known. That this program exists so that after anarchy and insurrection happens, a essentially secret government disappears off into a bunch of bunkers called hot sites, warm sites, and cold sites to hunker down so that they can rebuild the government once everybody dies. Real, real program.

Devolution: The Secret Government Plan

SHAWN RYAN: I saw that. So who— a lot of questions. Who determines who this is?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: It is a pre-chosen, pre-designated list of people. Now, that list is classified. Who is on that list is classified. How that list is determined is classified. But I’m glad we’re talking about this because let’s speculate, because that’s all we can do here.

I would guess it certainly changes by administration. In other words, the current president is not going to have a bunch of former President Biden’s designates go off and run the government. So then you really think about it like, wow, imagine being in that room deciding, okay, who are going— essentially, there’s kind of like a mirror image person of every high-ranking official because you have to assume, okay, POTUS could get the airborne bacteria in his lungs and die. So who’s going to be the devolution POTUS, the national security adviser, the SecDef? So all of these individuals. And by the way, it’s not just Defense Department, it’s health officials, Supreme Court justices. The government has to run.

So then, I mean, you have the eyebrow-raising side that I had, which is, wow, that’s a lot of plan. If there’s that much planning that goes into catastrophe, why don’t we have more public awareness about how to not have this happen?

SHAWN RYAN: We’ll get into that discussion. It’s called de-evolution.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Devolution. Devolution.

SHAWN RYAN: And we don’t know how often— I mean, there’s a lot of conspiracies on who really runs the government. They’re running wild right now. They ran wild in the last administration as well. I mean, probably every administration that comes, there’ll be this question. Do you think there’s a possibility that maybe they don’t get picked? Maybe they’re the ones that are running everything.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: You mean the actual devolution is already in effect and taking care of things? I don’t know. It’s certainly an interesting thought experiment. I also think conspiracy theory is such a bad term. I think it should be changed to speculative narrative.

SHAWN RYAN: I love that.

“Conspiracy Theory” vs. “Speculative Narrative”

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Because, I mean, for example, when COVID happened, on top of the WHO and the CDC saying COVID not airborne when it was airborne. So they got the most basic, most important, most critical fact wrong. And by the way, they’ve never admitted it. They’ve just quietly changed the idea that COVID was airborne about a year later.

And then there was the lab leak component of things, which, separate from what you think about that, is a real possibility. And yet when that was first reported, it was actually called a conspiracy theory by major news outlets. And we know it wasn’t a conspiracy theory. So why not change that verbiage to speculative narrative? It just takes everybody way down off the ledge. You can even say, if you’re talking about it, you can say it’s a wildly speculative narrative. But to call something a conspiracy theory, I think, is such self-righteous indignation and so potentially dangerous, because once you say that, you have a really tough time walking it back and admitting you’re wrong. And that to my eyes is—

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, the CIA created that term, correct?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Conspiracy theory? Didn’t they? I don’t know that. I have heard many different things. I think I would—

SHAWN RYAN: Or is that a speculative narrative?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Good. Look at that. We changed the thinking and the way people talk right here and now on the Shawn Ryan Show podcast. But you know what I mean? It gives room for being wrong. There’s something really, really character-building about being able to keep yourself open to, “I might be wrong about this.” And I don’t know why it has disappeared from the government. I just really don’t know.

I mean, there’s a famous JFK quote after the Bay of Pigs, which is a failure. And JFK said something like— I’m paraphrasing— “Success has a thousand fathers. Failure is an orphan.” And he was admitting his mistake in the Bay of Pigs, the CIA paramilitary attempt at invading Cuba that failed drastically. He was admitting defeat. He was admitting being wrong. And I think that’s profoundly important. It’s part of all of our personal lives, certainly mine. You’ve got to be able to, with your kids.

The Importance of Admitting You’re Wrong

SHAWN RYAN: I do it all the time publicly. I’ve had to do it 2 or 3 times this year, unfortunately. But I think that’s why we’re in the big distrust era of the government and all of our institutions and pretty much everything right now, because nobody has been able to admit wrong. And the funny thing is, it instantaneously reestablishes your credibility and even lifts it more because people realize, “Oh, this person actually has a moral compass. This person actually lives by a set of values.”

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Yes.

SHAWN RYAN: And you can’t say that for anybody in government because they never do. They’re too proud. There’s too much pride.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Pride goeth before the fall. I mean, I just think about pride as ego— or the unhealthy part of ego. Maybe the healthy part of ego is uncertainty, being able to say, “I don’t know, but I think it’s this.” I still cannot— I could not get a straight answer from government officials on these certain questions, like asking the CDC, “Why have you never admitted you were wrong about COVID not being airborne?” And they won’t go there. So people mistrust.

SHAWN RYAN: You’ve asked them?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: I always ask.

SHAWN RYAN: What do they say?

The Biological Arms Race and Devolution Protocols

ANNIE JACOBSEN: I mean, usually you get ignored on those questions, right? They— I mean, it’s why I spend so much of my time interviewing former SECDEF, former STRATCOM commander, former FEMA chief, because once they are out of government, they’re really out of the catbird seat, which is kind of fair that when you are in a government position, you have to toe the party line. You can’t really answer a straight question without going to 10 press officers and finding out what you’re supposed to say.

And maybe that is understandable in some component, but it also should change because people, I think, are advancing way beyond that in their own personal lives. You know, just the ability to get information on your fingertips is just so much faster now than it ever was that the government needs to adapt to that. “We’ll get back to you on an answer on that.” And then 6 weeks later, they’re giving you the answer and the question has already changed.

SHAWN RYAN: What about— what else about this devolution?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: I mean, it was—

SHAWN RYAN: Was it— was that a surprise to you?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’ve heard that term referenced, but it’s always referenced without any information attached to it because it’s the only thing that’s declassified. I was really kind of stunned that Craig Fugate was able to really share with me what he did because he signed off on the 2016 version of it the last day of the Obama administration. And that is the set of protocols from which all updates are made. So the system hasn’t changed. The names on the list might.

But there are other really, really interesting details I learned. Like, okay, again, spoiler alert, right? The president gets moved in the event of a major biological catastrophe where there is a pathogen that has a case fatality rate of 100%. I told you COVID had 1%. Plague— not bubonic plague, but pneumonic plague, which is pneumonic pneumonia. So in the lungs, when plague goes into the lungs, not bubonic plague. If you get bitten by a tick, you get bubonic plague. Your lymph nodes swell up and it sort of takes over parts of the body, your lymph system. Pneumonic plague in the lungs, 100% case fatality rate.

SHAWN RYAN: 100%.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: 100%. You get it, you die unless you take antibiotics. You have to take antibiotics within 24 hours, within 24 hours. By the way, one of my major sources on the book is one of the world’s experts on bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, Dr. Henry Hein. He was at USAMRIID, which is at Fort Detrick, studying this for a very long time until he left. Now he works privately. So all of this information is fully sourced.

But the big fear— I’m looping back to the president here— the big fear of the Defense Department, CDC, HHS, all of these organizations would be involved in a bio event. Something, a pathogen is released, either a lab leak or an attack. It’s airborne and it has a case fatality rate of 100%. Then I said, the medical countermeasures— how are we going to stop it? Well, what if it has been genetically modified to defeat antibiotics? Again, sounds like Annie’s talking science fiction. There are plans in place because this is what is feared.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m sure there are.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: In this event, the president— I learned this and, you know, sometimes you get information and you go, I got to reverse engineer my book from that because this is just too dramatic. The president does not get moved to a big bunker like Raven Rock or Mount Weather. Any of these command centers we can talk about if you want more details. He gets moved to what’s called a cold site, like really far away, by himself.

It’s such a crazy visual to think about the president of the United States with a gas mask, by himself in a room, his military aide with the nuclear football outside the door, and a couple of Secret Service agents watching the building. For how long? I mean, that to me sounds like science fiction. To realize it’s science fact is like— I got to know about this. And that’s how I work as a reporter. Like, okay, so how does that happen?

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, who—

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Are there— you know, that’s the end of democracy.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I’d like to go back a little bit and talk about maybe the biological arms race before we get to this. But I mean, who do they think they’re going to even govern? I mean, the billionaires and trillionaires that are building bunkers in Hawaii— what are they going to do, come out of your bunker and do what? Like, what are you going to govern? Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg? I don’t think so. They’re not being governed right now.

The Biological Weapons Convention and the Soviet Deception

ANNIE JACOBSEN: And you got to think of the skills you have to have to survive in that kind of a world. Okay, so biological arms race. Here’s an interesting fact: biological war is illegal. Biological weapons are illegal. Nuclear weapons are not illegal. Crazy thought. There’s only a certain amount of countries that have them and they’re making sure no one else gets them, hence Iran. But nuclear weapons are not illegal to those who hold them. Biological weapons— all biological weapons are illegal.

They were made illegal by a treaty called the Biological Weapons Convention, the BWC. It’s the treaty in 1972. Before that, the United States had a massive arsenal of biological weapons, which is just crazy to think about. That’s Cold War paranoia for you. We had them. Russia had them. China was building them. North Korea. All right. So they became illegal. President Nixon decided they’re “repugnant to the conscience of mankind.” That’s what he said. And he makes them illegal. Everyone signed. We destroyed our biological weapons. It took 219 weeks to destroy them, by the way.

So everybody says we’re going to destroy our biological weapons. Everybody signs the treaty. Not for another 20 years would the United States learn from Soviet defector scientists that the Russians went, “Oh yeah, here, we signed that treaty.” And then they began to build a colossal biological weapons program. They called it their Manhattan Project. And the idea, which is so spooky, is that they wanted to kill all the people in America and the West and leave the infrastructure intact. Those were their words.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. Smart and interesting and evil. I mean, we were talking about Ancestry.com, 23andMe. Who knows what else is out there that people are using. But I mean, how many different types of biological weapons do you need? Can they— I mean, I’m sure they can. Can they, by sucking that DNA out— or LabCorp, the biggest blood diagnostics company in the world— can they get that information, hack that information, or just sell it? I mean, I think 23andMe and Ancestry and probably all the other ones have sold all the data multiple times, allegedly. But is it possible to create a biological weapon that would only target American DNA, Canadian DNA, North American DNA, Latino DNA, Black DNA? Any race?

DNA-Targeted Bioweapons and China’s Suspected Program

ANNIE JACOBSEN: There is. And that, by the way, is not something I get into in the book. It was a little too speculative for me to really go down. But let me tell you who confirmed it. I asked that exact question to Admiral Brett Giroir, and he was the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services at the White House during COVID. He’s also a medical doctor. He ran DARPA’s bioscience office. He’s an incredible human being and a character in the book for sure. He’s a really remarkable person. Grew up in a small town in Texas, first guy in his town to go to Harvard, fully dedicated to service his whole life.

I asked him that question and he said to me, after a bit of a pause, “Yes. And there are suspicions that China is doing that.” So the suspicions part of it is where I make a distinction as a journalist. I’m going to work my scenario from what is known, what is on the record, and what has been confirmed by people on the other side. Because then I can never be accused of fearmongering. If I were to go down that lane, perhaps people would say, “Well, you’re fearmongering because it’s speculative because you don’t know for sure.” Right now, when you have someone like Admiral Giroir saying it’s speculative, the subtext in that— you and I can infer what that means. So I don’t think someone like that is going to say something like that to me off the cuff without a little more fear, shall we say, than speculation.

SHAWN RYAN: So there’s speculative rumors that China is creating this or has created it.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Yes. And there is also—

SHAWN RYAN: I’ve never been so happy to have Asian blood.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Really? How is that? You got to tell me that. How is that?

SHAWN RYAN: Because I’m part Japanese. Yeah, I’m good.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: I never knew that. Mom or dad?

SHAWN RYAN: Dad. Dad.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Interesting. Okay, so you got the DNA immunity, perhaps, if that’s the case. Hopefully. There’s a very interesting paper for anyone who’s interested in reading on this. Dr. Robert Kadlec, a source in the book— he is now in the current administration, essentially the biodefense chief. He was dedicated to biodefense starting in the Bush administration and has had huge, powerful jobs across every administration. He actually ran Operation Warp Speed during COVID, which was the vaccine program. He’s an Air Force colonel and a medical doctor, and he’s now the current president’s biodefense chief.

We had conversations before, and then when you go back into the administration, you can’t really talk to a journalist like me. But right before going back into the administration, he wrote a paper on China’s biological program. So the State Department speculates China has a bioweapons program. The State Department confirms that Russia has a bioweapons program. North Korea has a bioweapons program according to the U.S. State Department. China, maybe. Iran, maybe. That’s what they say. Maybe.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I’m sorry, what was the Wuhan lab?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: So here’s “maybe.” And again, we’re talking about language.

SHAWN RYAN: What about Ukraine?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: We’re talking about language.

SHAWN RYAN: Those are our biolabs.

Gain of Function Research and the Wuhan Loophole

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Those were some of ours. So the position of the State Department is that the Russian biological program I told you about— that very evil program in the ’70s and ’80s— was absorbed, not dismantled. And so that is why they take the position Russia still has a program.

And China— so this is how a diplomat would clarify “maybe.” The treaty I told you about, the BWC, which everybody is supposed to adhere to as signatories and not have bioweapons— there’s a tiny go-around, which is that you can do genetic engineering for defensive purposes, for prophylactic purposes. And so that’s where you get the Wuhan excuse, which is that “we were modifying the coronavirus so that we would know how to defend against it.” You see, so that’s the kind of catch-22. In plain language, I call it a hooky-doo, which allows these BSL-4 labs— biosafety level 4, that’s the highest level, guys in spacesuits— to manipulate viruses and pathogens in really dangerous ways so that in case somebody else uses it, we know how to defend against it.

And that has its own longer conversation, and it’s extremely dangerous. It’s called gain of function. It’s just like it sounds. You are trying to make a pathogen gain new function. As I mentioned before— virulence, transmissibility, how do we catch it? Virulence, is it going to kill me and how fast? And is there a medical countermeasure? Those 3 components. Gain of function tweaks those.

Okay, so let’s make it more airborne. Let’s make it go from droplet transmission— which would be me coughing at you and you, sorry, my spit hitting you, that’s droplet transmission— versus us talking, airborne, lingering in the air. Somebody else could walk in here after we leave and it’s still here. That’s the number one threat. You can, with gain-of-function genetic engineering, make a pathogen airborne. Whoa.

Select Agents and Tier 1 Bioweapon Threats

SHAWN RYAN: What are the different kinds? Do you know?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Of pathogens?

SHAWN RYAN: Of bioweapons.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Well, yeah, great question. And again, stuff we should know about, right? Because then we the public can react appropriately as opposed to creating speculative narratives about what could happen. Ebola, for example. The Hantavirus, right? So the CDC keeps a list of what are called Tier 1— common term— select agents. Those are the pathogens that they’re most afraid will be weaponized. Subtext: have been weaponized in the past. They probably have speculative intelligence that they are being weaponized. Plague is one of them. Why? 100% death rate if you don’t have antibiotics. Anthrax is another. Ebola is another, because it’s got fear factor. Ebola is not airborne. So, but what if you could tweak Ebola to be airborne?

SHAWN RYAN: What does Ebola do to you?

The Ebola Crisis and Medical Countermeasures

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Ebola is called a hemorrhagic fever virus, right? So think of what hemorrhaging is. You’re just bleeding. Bleeding. Okay. Ebola causes the body, the entire body to hemorrhage. You’re bleeding out your eyes, your ears, your nose. I mean, it is a horrific, terrifying disease. It’s also not airborne. You get Ebola from close contact. If there’s somebody over there in that corner bleeding out, if you’re a first responder, you may go help them. That’s why doctors, first responders, if you’re the patient’s mother, that’s why the loved ones die from Ebola. But the guy walking down the street is not going to get Ebola because he’s going to keep his distance.

So that again takes us back to transmissibility. It takes us to virulence. Ebola is an 85-90% rate killer. So it’s super deadly. Is there a medical countermeasure against it? Third question to ask. Well, after the 2014 Ebola epidemic, doctors got at it. Those same kind of doctors that Dr. Kadlec worked with, with Warp Speed, doctors got at it. They created in San Diego a medical countermeasure called ZMapp.

So when one Ebola patient arrived in Texas in 2014 and gave his 2 nurses Ebola, he died because he was further along. Those 2 nurses — in this heroics that is completely unknown but involves Dr. Admiral Giroir, which is why I know the story — he knew about the ZMapp medical countermeasure being developed in San Diego. The CDC in Texas wouldn’t help him. It hadn’t been authorized. He got a friend who was a pilot and had a plane to fly to San Diego, get the ZMapp, brought it back, gave it to the nurses. They lived.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Now this new form of Ebola in Africa has mutated and the ZMapp doesn’t work. Will doctors, will scientists be able to create a medical countermeasure fast enough before that epidemic that is going on in Africa becomes bigger? Who knows? Will that epidemic be able to be contained and put out?

Designing a Bioweapon: A Thought Experiment

SHAWN RYAN: When you’re writing and doing this research, have you thought about if you were to create a bioweapon, what it would look like?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Me?

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, well, I do. I’ve been thinking about it the entire conversation. I already know what I would do now. Tell me, have you thought about it?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: I think about that. It’s a fascinating question. I think about that from the dramatic narrative point of view, working from what is scientifically possible. So that’s why I chose pneumonic plague. And even more so, the reason why I chose pneumonic plague is for a very specific reason — that when the Soviet defectors came and finally revealed to the West what the Russians had been doing, and mind you, this is 30, 40 years ago when genetic engineering was not possible, they had created a super plague weapon, airborne, with plans to be genetically modified.

This is early genetic engineering, like almost — imagine using scissors to cut film and taping it back together as opposed to digital editing today. That would be the analogy of where things were. The Soviet scientists, by their own admittance, created a plague weapon that they had built in — they had genetically modified it to defeat antibiotics. And even worse, to actually trigger a new disease, encephalitis in the brain, once you take the antibiotic.

And by the Russian scientists’ own admittance, the reason they did that was because they hated America so much in the Cold War. Not only did they want to kill all the people and take the infrastructure — march in and just take everything, the buildings would be there, unlike in nuclear — but they wanted people to die with the last thought in their brain that the government had failed them, because the antibiotics that the American medical establishment and the government told Americans to take to defeat the plague weapon would kill them in an even more horrific way. This was their plan. This is on the books. This is documented. So to answer your question, I couldn’t come up with anything more sinister than that.

SHAWN RYAN: Myself.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: And I wanted to stick to science fact. And so that’s the very specific pathogen that gets unleashed in Biological War Scenario, my book. And by the way, it’s not a nefarious act. It’s a lab leak.

Shawn’s Hypothetical Multi-Stage Bioweapon Strategy

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. I think what I would do is I would have stages. Maybe you do something that is an attention grabber like COVID. Maybe you make a pathogen that targets the reproductive system, and then you get the news cycle going and it’s — nobody in North America can reproduce anymore. But you have the antidote. You let the headlines percolate. This is why you’re not reproducing, because I’ve created this. And if you want the antidote, then your government is going to do X, Y, and Z.

Maybe it’s something even quicker. Maybe it is something like COVID. If you want to get better, this is what you’re going to do. If you try to nuke us, you won’t get the antidote. So this is what’s going to happen if you don’t listen. Then we’re going to go to the next step and we’re going to prove to you that it’s real. And this is what’s going to happen to your body. Then that happens. Then everybody knows. And then it just keeps escalating. If you want to save human life, or give them the option to save themselves — that’s how I would do it.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: And that’s a very sort of red teaming mind scenario, which is what war games at the Pentagon, from my understanding, are entirely based on — like getting people to think through those incredibly sinister ideas to try and have a plan in place to prevent that from happening.

And so in my experience and learning about all of this, what’s interesting is that all of that is very valuable and that’s sort of historical red teaming and wargaming. But what has been left out of the discussion are 2 major components, which is one, how fast science and technology are moving. So you can’t possibly keep up with it. Although yours did a great — the 3-stage thing is really sinister and very scientific.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, it also gives them the option to save themselves.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Explain to me that a little bit more on the third part of it.

SHAWN RYAN: On my plan?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: My plan is you get the attention.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: Everybody knows something’s up. Then you take credit for what’s happening.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: This is the bad guy.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, it’s the bad guy or the good guy. Maybe there is genocide going on somewhere in the world, like we see all over right now, right? And then the country that’s committing genocide gets a pathogen that makes their people sick. They’re not dying — maybe some die — but it grabs that nation’s headlines. And then you make the statement: if you don’t want this to continue, you stop the genocide right now. If the genocide continues, then we’ll move to stage 2. Stage 2 is you bleed out of every orifice in your body. Would you like that to happen, yes or no? You have 2 hours.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: And this is—

SHAWN RYAN: 2 hours goes by, they don’t do it, the next pathogen is released. It’s already staged. It stops, they get the antidote. That gets released.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: These are some of the hallmarks of early biological warfare thinking, with another component mixed in, which is that you would need to inoculate — give a vaccine essentially — to your own people that would be anywhere near that area to make sure they didn’t—

SHAWN RYAN: Well, that’s dependent if you target a certain race of people that all share a common strand of DNA.

Biological Warfare, Genetic Targeting, and China’s Program

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Yes. And this is exactly what that Cold War mentality was, by the way. It’s almost like mental hostage-taking, essentially, on a grand scale. And then the conclusion by pretty much everyone involved was the blowback idea — that you couldn’t contain it. Because the pathogen would have to be contagious to be really effective. And then you would have these concentric circles of people getting sick. So that’s where biological warfare became obsolete in terms of thinking. And that’s why they made it illegal.

But people still think about that. And now with scientific advancements, with genetic engineering, being able to target individual people is becoming much more of a reality. And by the way, that’s what I meant to say in Dr. Kadlec’s paper. He’s the current biodefense chief. There’s a public paper you can read that he wrote on China’s — what he believes is China’s, or rather what’s on the record about China’s biological program. And the Chinese officials in their defense department have essentially said they are not against — they actually have programs in place for precisely the kind of warfare that you’re talking about.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, it’s just — this is what God did to the Egyptians in the Old Testament, correct?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: It is a narrative that has existed. And it’s like, where does it go? The argument not to have that is it’s too evil and the consequences are too great. Hence the idea that it is odious to the nature of mankind.

So the bigger idea that I think we’re getting to is — what is the solution if all of this is possible? And right now we’re kind of stuck in this idea of, well, the debate is really only on the gain-of-function, right? The debate is like, the bad guys are making those kind of weapons, maybe even targeting a certain genetic population. And so we have to create medical countermeasures because of it.

And if that continues — whether you think that’s utopian or dystopian — that’s a worthy debate, I think, because I’ve heard arguments on both sides of the aisle. Like, you cannot prevent the bad guys, the adversary, whoever they may be — terrorist organizations, some crazy college kid or high school student in his basement. You can’t prevent them. You can’t prevent all evil. The threshold’s too low. So the biotechnology industry must prevail, must be allowed to work on these medical countermeasures that involve tweaking the virulence, the transmissibility, and the medical countermeasures of different pathogens.

Either way, I think it’s very important that people know about this so that in the godforsaken event something does happen, there’s not an immediate wildly speculative narrative, right?

Government Countermeasures and the Chimera Weapon

SHAWN RYAN: So does the government have any countermeasures for the citizens of this country, or is it just for themselves?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Well, the countermeasure question — the reason why I use that Soviet sort of evil concept, it’s called the Chimera weapon, bioweapon. The Chimera is this ancient Greek monster. You’ve seen images of it. Think of the head of a lion and the tail of a serpent, or with a goat coming out of it. A chimera just means a multi-specied monster. And that is essentially what genetic engineering is. You’re taking the DNA of one viral species and you’re mixing it with another.

And so the Chimera weapon — the original Chimera weapon was this plague superweapon where you take the antidote and it turns into a booby trap and it kills you. So that idea becomes what the Defense Department calls a wicked problem, because there is no solution to it. Because how do you know whether or not the antibiotic is going to kill you unless you have evidence? And that’s where the devolution plan happens pretty much really fast because the chances can’t be taken because the threat’s so high.

And so on the public health side of things, you have a lot of people — instead of saying, well, you can’t just go down the evil rabbit hole of the military industrial complex of it — you have to have public health awareness. And that’s why there are a lot of people I interviewed in the book who were like, it’s all about diagnostics. Diagnostics — fancy word for testing. I mean, remember in COVID, by the end of COVID year 2 or whatever it was, I live in Los Angeles. You could buy a COVID test at the 7-Eleven. Remember? Did you have that access kind of year?

SHAWN RYAN: You could literally— We may have. I don’t know. The test didn’t work. I got— I never wanted to get tested anyways because there was the speculative narratives that they were calling you after you got tested to make sure that you— yes, that you know, whatever. But my wife was pregnant at the time. Nobody really knew what the hell was going on. So I did get tested, and I took 2 tests, and one was positive and one was negative. And the speculative narratives were correct. I did get calls. And you took them at like an urgent care? Yeah, I took it at an urgent care.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: And you know, it’s so— so I never took another. And that was before that. So yeah, I guess that was— if I could have done something undocumented, then I would have done something undocumented. Yeah. Because I don’t want my information in the government’s hands. But not that it isn’t already. But so, no, we didn’t. We didn’t have the over-the-counter tests at that particular point in time, which would have been around 2021.

The National Syndromic Surveillance System

ANNIE JACOBSEN: So in big cities, you could suddenly literally buy a dipstick. They were called dipstick tests, and you could sit in your car and test yourself. And then you were supposed to— because there were asymptomatic people in COVID, meaning people who carried COVID, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it’s called officially, and didn’t have any symptoms like my son. So then you were supposed to work on the honor system of like not being around anybody because you were a carrier. It’s called a silent carrier. You could get everybody else sick, but you weren’t sick.

But I think your point about not wanting the government to know is so incredibly important that the government has to learn from these errors. They have to work with the public. People do not want the sense that the government is lurking over them and looming over them, particularly with their health. It’s like the biotechnology surveillance military-industrial complex, and it’s very real.

But I found an interesting loophole in it that I drill on into the book, which I’m sure will raise some eyebrows from groups of people, and I don’t care, which is that— so after 9/11, Dick Cheney himself was personally terrified of bioweapons. And he was part and parcel to this extreme elevation, escalation of gain-of-function, of medical countermeasures, of opening up more biosecurity level 4 labs, of all of this sort of biotech industry. Billions of dollars went into this industry, this brand new industry.

Remember, there was 9/11. People forget. Then there were the anthrax attacks. Anthrax was mailed through the mail to some news outlets and a couple senators on Capitol Hill. Never been solved. Thank you, FBI. Okay. Literally.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, that’s a given.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Okay. So it created an entire industry about biodefense. And one of the results of that was— many people don’t know about this— there is something called the National Syndromic Surveillance System that monitors, that collects information in real time from more than 7,000 emergency rooms, urgent care facilities, yours included. All of these facilities across America, 7,000 of them in the 50 states. That is a lot. All the information goes in near real time to the CDC where it is kept and monitored. Okay? So it’s a very real system that is monitoring people, the goal of which was to stop a pandemic if it happens. Well, how did that work out in COVID? Not well.

But a little loophole I found in it— and you know this from your work in the military, that a hole is exactly what an adversary targets. And a fascinating hole to me is that— and this I learned from working with America’s most senior epidemiologists, people who are trying to prevent outbreaks from taking over— one of the holes in the system that they pointed out to me was the homeless population. There are 800,000 homeless people in America. None of their information goes into that important CDC National Syndromic Survey, a fact confirmed with me by HHS, by the way.

So if you have that kind of a gaping hole, where are you going to target? Where are the super spreader events? Where is there no healthcare? Where are these people living on top of one another? Where are their symptoms of disease going to be mistaken for a zillion other things if they even have any access to a medical doctor? And so that is where I have the outbreak in America, because I was told by epidemiologists that is a very serious warning.

SHAWN RYAN: But with the last 2 books you’ve written, I cannot believe you’re still living in Los Angeles. You got to get out to the woods, Annie.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: I mean, driving around here, it’s very beautiful.

SHAWN RYAN: I have to say, you know, we get a little walking around room out here.

Lessons from COVID and the Threat of Biological War

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Mm-hmm. But the idea of insurrection and anarchy at the end of all of this, which is what happens, which is what the Defense Department is preparing for— sure, the big cities are just like, get me out of here really fast. But there are components of all of this.

In every book, there’s always a couple interviews, a couple things that people say to you that just is haunting. And one of them was from former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. So I just mentioned the anthrax attacks after 9/11. Daschle’s office received an envelope of weaponized anthrax. They all got an immediate dose of Cipro, which is an antibiotic assumed to kill anthrax. And it did. But Daschle, Senator Tom Daschle, has spent decades since working on biodefense. He obviously is seriously concerned about this issue.

And in my interview with him, we were talking about nuclear war versus biowar. And he said to me, “Unlike nuclear war, biological war will be perhaps more terrifying because— yes, it will be death physically, death governmentally, death of everything we know in America. But most horrifying is it will be people doing inhuman things to other people just to survive.” And that’s that desperation. Desperation.

SHAWN RYAN: This happens in any, pretty much any event. I mean, eventually people get to hunger, thirst, disease.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Absolutely.

SHAWN RYAN: Financial collapse.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: And so out in the country, in the city, pick your battle, literally. And again, the point of me working on these kind of scenarios is not to create panic. It’s to create pressure. It’s to create conversation. If nuclear war was about, “We need to have this conversation while we can still have it,” bio is about stay informed. Because there are actions that people have to take in the event that this kind of a situation happens, period, full stop.

COVID could have been this brilliant situation from which to learn errors. Notice I said could have been. Instead, it’s like either total denial about what happened or tribal anger about the wrongs that were done. And there were many. And so that, I think, is worth reexamining. I think it would be really wise to look at the problems that happened in COVID and not make those same mistakes.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I mean, there’s a lot of speculative narratives that say that maybe that was an experiment. To see how the population would react.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: I have not heard that one. The speculative narrative on that is that it’s internal, domestic, or external.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t know. It could be both, could be none. But I mean, a lot of those narratives running around— they wanted to see how the people reacted and if they basically listen to the government or if they do not listen to the government. And I don’t know. I mean, they definitely learned a lot, whoever, if it was an experiment. Even if it wasn’t an experiment, they learned a lot about how we’re going to react. Are we going to take the vaccines? Are we going to do the— I mean, they learned that. Are we going to stay in our homes? How long are we going to stay in our homes? How long are we going to buy this bullshit? I mean, they collected a lot of information there.

DNA Data, HHS, and the Surveillance State

ANNIE JACOBSEN: A lot of information. And I’m going to really tap into your fear about the national syndromic surveillance system here. Again, it’s a fact that— think about, and I’m amazed that people don’t ask this question, where did all the DNA data go from those COVID tests? Because it was collected. And so my eye as the journalist is like, why isn’t— I mean, I certainly have asked a zillion people.

What I do know is that HHS— so again, an organization most people have never heard of, maybe they heard of it during COVID— the US Department of Health and Human Services, current secretary, RFK Jr. An organization that most people have never heard of that has a budget, an annual budget twice that of the Defense Department.

SHAWN RYAN: Really? Twice that?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Twice. $1.7 or $1.8 trillion is HHS. Defense Department is about $900 million. And yet nobody— people don’t even know it. The CDC answers to HHS. The NIH, the National Institutes of Health, answers to HHS. The FDA answers to HHS.

Another situation I’m always fond of is bringing to the discussion— oh, there are some really interesting organizations that you might want to know about. And again, speculative narrative versus science fiction, science fact. HHS is the organization in charge in the event of a biological incident or attack. And a biological incident is a lab leak. Okay? HHS is in charge. Which is stunning to think about. Because what I learned also writing this whole narrative is like, I actually wish DOD was in charge.

SHAWN RYAN: Really? Why is that?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: There’s a line I write in the book, kind of at the midpoint, where I take you through what happens. The Defense Department trying to figure out what’s going on, what’s happened. I start the inciting incident in the book as an explosion at a BSL-4 lab in Russia, in Siberia. It’s called Vector. It’s where a lot of the work took place during the Cold War. It’s a real lab. There was actually a real explosion there in 2019. An explosion at a BSL-4 lab is profoundly dangerous in a place like Russia where they’re going to immediately not be transparent. It’s even more dangerous. Or maybe you could say that about every nation.

But the cover-up begins, and I show readers how the Defense Department will be immediately eyes on trying to figure out what’s going on. They will work with the State Department to try and get information. Information is king. Denial is dangerous.

In the Wuhan lab leak— or natural, whatever you want to call it— when Wuhan happened, the Chinese government immediately shut down access to information. Incredibly dangerous. I spoke to epidemiologists who actually believe that pandemic could have been stopped had the Chinese government been transparent about what happened. So that’s a real plug for transparency. And the more people that know about something, the more they’re going to demand transparency.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think they wanted to shut that down?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: COVID, the big— you mean China?

SHAWN RYAN: You think they wanted to contain it?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Did they want to contain it? That I don’t know. But what I do know is because biological weapons are illegal, if any nation has bioweapons in their lab, they are certainly not going to be transparent about what happened.

Supply Chain Vulnerabilities and the Mask Narrative

SHAWN RYAN: Well, we already know. I mean, we already discussed the loopholes, so they do. I mean, it’s an easy excuse. I mean, I think China learned a lot about that. I mean, they also have the monopoly, probably along with India, for all the PPE equipment and antibiotics, especially the ones that work— ivermectin. You know, they could have shut that down immediately because anything that the patent is up on, we don’t produce it. We don’t care about actual people. We just care about money here. And so they produce all that stuff.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: And I think Americans learned a little bit about that during COVID. We learned about the supply chain. Most people were shocked to find out exactly what you just mentioned. And yet very little has been done about that, although there are some manufacturing changes going on.

SHAWN RYAN: Even when COVID happened, there was the big mask narrative. “Oh, the masks are going to stop this shit.” Who makes all the masks? You get a virus that comes from China, and then China supplies us with the fing masks that are supposed to protect us, and we’re just putting this shit on hook, line, and sinker, buddy. Like, “Oh yeah, cool, they’re the ones that released the thing, that leaked the virus.” And now they’re going to give us masks. I mean, we can’t even make our own fing masks.

The Mask Problem and COVID’s Missed Lessons

ANNIE JACOBSEN: We cannot make our own masks. And you can’t even have a grown-up in the room explain to people how a mask works. So instead you had sort of people going— when I was reporting the book at the very tail end of COVID, I went to a BSL-3 lab to see what it was like. And these are former USAMRIID doctors. USAMRIID is the US Army Medical Research of Infectious Diseases. It’s where the BSL-4 lab is at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

And with regards to the masks, they were telling me that if you are working in pathogens, it’s just basic common knowledge that an N95 mask, you have to wear it properly outfitted to your face. You get an actual lesson in how to wear it, and it’s suggested that it is only going to work for 15 minutes. And that’s an N95 mask.

SHAWN RYAN: Those were gone in about 2 days.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: So the other kind of masks are essentially almost useless. And I think that kind of—

SHAWN RYAN: We were wearing 2 of them. I mean, I wasn’t.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: People were wearing dirty masks, and sometimes you still see people walking around Los Angeles.

SHAWN RYAN: Great looking face diaper you got on there.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: But nobody spoke of this. And when I say nobody, I mean like sort of a public official in a position of authority. And meanwhile, I’m learning that all the scientists in America are shaking their head and going— but afraid to speak out because they’re going to be called— ostracized. So this was just, again, a dangerous situation from which extraordinary lessons could have been learned and were not.

Los Angeles: Unprepared for a Biological Attack

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s get back to biological warfare. So what does the panic look like? Did you talk to people on what that kind of desperation, that panic, what would it do to society? How fast would it happen?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: It happened so fast. So I like to try and look at specifics again, to keep the narrative on actual documentation. We spoke a little bit earlier about how an outbreak of this pathogen— I talk about it starts with a lab leak in Siberia, it winds up in Los Angeles in a homeless camp.

And so I looked, because I live in Los Angeles and I am very familiar with the public health system— I’ve lived there for 30 years— the public health system, law enforcement, I can see a lot of the problems that have, to my eye, happened over the decades. It wasn’t always like this. It certainly is just an absolute mess right now with very little trust and real serious problems.

So I looked at, for example, what would happen in a biological attack in Los Angeles, because unbeknownst to many people, big cities practice these things. And they happen at the federal level, and they also happen at the state level. And so Los Angeles State and County— California State and Los Angeles County officials get abysmally failing remarks in these efforts. And this just goes completely unnoticed.

Like, for example, we put in a whole new 911 system recently, like in the past few years, and it completely failed upon its original test. Like a system overrun. There are stories of people calling all the time. People are posting on X like 911 from Los Angeles, and then you can see how many minutes they’ve been on hold— like 13 minutes on hold just to have your call answered.

So this is a real serious problem day to day. Imagine if there was a biological incident where timing is everything. You have to get the information out to the people. And instead, I learned really interesting details like— okay, so Los Angeles has a 100,000-bottle supply of Cipro, ciprofloxacin, which is an antibiotic stash.

SHAWN RYAN: 100,000?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: 100,000 bottles.

SHAWN RYAN: How many people does that treat?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: For the city officials. And I break it down of who it goes to. You’ve got like 16,000 bottles going to first responders. Obviously they need it. And then a bunch of them going to like the zoo officials, and the cultural affairs officials. I mean, I’m not kidding. I give you the numbers. So it seems to be really poorly thought out.

And really what I wanted to know is what happens to law enforcement? What happens to first responders? I did an interview with a fire commissioner named Jimmy Hara, who unfortunately died tragically last month in a car accident.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, man.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: I know. And he was an incredible person, completely dedicated. I mean, he served as a doctor in Vietnam, and he’s been dedicated to LA public health and fire safety ever since. And he told me just flat out, Los Angeles is completely unprepared for a pneumonic plague attack. Period, full stop. And then he took me through some of the details of what would happen.

So in mixing these documents with interviews like Fire Commissioner Hara, I could begin to see that it’s just complete ignorance. It’s like being an ostrich with your head in the sand.

The 100,000-Bottle Problem: How Panic Becomes Anarchy

And the 100,000 bottles of Cipro— I also learned— have this wacky program attached to it. And this goes to where you’re asking: where is the insurrection and anarchy that the Defense Department in their documents is so worried about? Like, how does that happen? That’s what I wanted to really drill down on so that I could explain it to readers. And the 100,000 bottles are just a perfect example that would repeat around the country.

So this 100,000-bottle supply gets dispersed by volunteers. How does that work? Imagine if you had a biological incident where you’ve got pneumonic plague with 100% death rate, no known cure, airborne, killing homeless people, which is being mistaken for something else— a mass overdose, for example— because that’s happening all over the country. That’s what epidemiologists are worried about.

You’ve got law enforcement unprotected rushing in to help. And then you’ve got this kind of wild chaos at City Hall— rather in the emergency department of the city planners. And they’re like, “Get the Cipro out to everybody.” And they make an announcement on Facebook, which then goes viral. And so now you have everybody in Los Angeles trying to access what they believe is the medical countermeasure which will save their lives and the lives of their family members.

And America is a nation of guns. 500 million guns in America, according to a Gallup poll. So you can see, that’s where insurrection and anarchy happens. That’s the Daschle quote— people doing inhuman things just to survive. And by the way, not from Annie Jacobsen’s imagination. Looking at declassified or unclassified war games that game this out show that is exactly what people begin to kill one another over— perceived medical countermeasures. It’s a grim story.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious. I mean, I don’t think people think about it, but of course, what measure are you going to take to save your husband and your kids? And I think it’s going to be like that until the playing field is level. And it looks like Yemen, Afghanistan, where there is not really much social hierarchy. Everybody’s on the same playing field.

And so it will just continue until that happens, until all the resources have been ransacked. It’s done. There’s nothing left to ransack. And then you have to learn to survive off what’s left.

Military Intervention and the Devolution of Order

ANNIE JACOBSEN: The devolution component of that that was stunning to me was what the Defense Department prepares for. What’s interesting is I mentioned before that HHS is in charge of this when it happens, but very quickly HHS realizes in its plan— in wargaming— that they need the military’s help. This is page one, because for example, they can’t get supplies out to the states.

And when you’re talking about a pathogen that’s killing people in like 48 hours, speed is everything. And so they’re trying to get medical countermeasures out to states, and they need the military’s help. They need Transportation Command. And so I had this moment in working on this book where I realized— my God— not since World War II will Americans be so happy to see the military show up in their town or their city to try and regain control, to try and bring back order in the insurrection that will be unfolding as people begin to panic.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, maybe they would be happy.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Well, I think a lot of people would be happy because not everybody’s criminally minded. And are going to be thinking help is on the way.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I mean, how is the military to treat the infected—

ANNIE JACOBSEN: And that’s where it gets—

SHAWN RYAN: Especially if they don’t have an antidote.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: So the military, I learned— and you probably know this— has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its personnel. So imagine: the military are protected, and now you have another situation which is the mask becomes a coveted item.

So now you have the president declaring an Insurrection Act so that Posse Comitatus can be overridden. Posse Comitatus— the act after the Civil War that prohibits the military from carrying out law enforcement measures in the United States. That gets repealed with the Insurrection Act. It’s the only act that can do that. The president has the authority to declare it whenever he chooses.

So the Insurrection Act gets laid down and now the military can act with those orders, same as in a war theater. There’s like a moment in time, it seemed to my eye writing this, where order could be restored. But then I learned that there’s only so many military and there are 340 million Americans. So you do the math.

And then you realize that with shoot-to-kill orders and the fact that the devolution plan calls for— there’s a component of American infrastructure called critical infrastructure. You don’t even really think about it until you hopefully read about it in my book and go, “Of course”— like the roadways, everything from the communication systems, the banking systems, the roads, the nuclear power plants, the electrical grid, the water treatment plants, wastewater. This is critical infrastructure and that needs to be guarded.

And that’s what the military begins to guard. And the military must also guard the hot sites, the cold sites I told you about earlier, where the devolution crews are going to. And so this kind of really spooky, almost science fiction— but again, it’s science fact— kicks in in my reporting. And as I write in the book, you begin to see what unfolds and how it is almost inevitable. The outcome of devolution, because the center can’t hold, because the people do not know what is happening to them and have no way of understanding what lies ahead.

Hurricane Preparedness and Societal Breakdown

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, if you want a small window, a very small window of what that looks like, you can go to Florida during hurricane season. And you see how fast everything is gone, how people treat each other. That’s one of the reasons I moved out of there.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: What was that experience like for you with the hurricane? Was there kind of like some anarchy going on?

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I would not say anarchy at all, but I’ve always been pretty prepared. But you’re looking at gas lines that are hours and hours long. People hoard. So you got a guy show up with a trailer and he fills up his car and he fills up his boat and then he fills up all his gas cans. And you’re wondering, is there going to be any gas left for me?

All the bottled water is gone, all the food is gone, all the plywood is gone, all the generators are gone within 24 hours. And then you’re waiting for updates to see which Home Depot has been resupplied with plywood so that you can go board your windows up, or which Walmart has some extra generators, has got a new shipment of generators.

In the last hurricane that I went through, this was like, I’m out of here. No, this isn’t for me. There was a traffic jam from Miami, Florida, all the way to Atlanta, Georgia. The entire—

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Everybody trying to get out, everybody trying to get out of Dodge.

SHAWN RYAN: Everybody’s trying to funnel out on a couple of highways. And it’s stop-and-go traffic. People run out of gas, they’re pulled over on the side of the road. Everybody’s hoarding. The grocery stores are legitimately empty in 24 hours.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Were people following traffic laws? Were people driving on the grass?

SHAWN RYAN: It’s bottlenecked. There are no traffic laws. You can’t get anywhere. It’s gridlocked. A gas line will go all the way down the interstate.

FEMA and Crisis Management

ANNIE JACOBSEN: So let me ask you, FEMA—

SHAWN RYAN: That’s a hurricane. Yes, that’s a hurricane.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: That’s a hurricane.

SHAWN RYAN: And that hurricane didn’t even— it was like a joke. I think it was Hurricane Matthew. And then you see all these memes, like the days after show a lawn chair flipped upside down and “we will rebuild.”

ANNIE JACOBSEN: The threat of the hurricane was even as compulsive as the hurricane itself.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, just the threat. I mean, what were we calling it? Speculative narratives. I mean, I’ve had the speculative narrative that maybe these corporations are paying the news cycle just to overhype this, because the amount of revenue that happens instantaneously for everything— booze, cigarettes, gas generators, plywood, water, bullets, guns. People get worried that it’s going to last forever and they go stock up on bullets. They go buy their first AR-15.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Was there any sight of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency? Because FEMA— what do you think about FEMA?

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I don’t really know much about it. I don’t think they come in until afterwards. I’ve never had any experience with FEMA, so—

ANNIE JACOBSEN: FEMA is another one of those really interesting organizations that’s almost not known about. And by the way, they’re the ones in charge of the devolution program, so consider that.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, FEMA is— it’s not volunteers, but I know a lot of people after the hurricanes or after a natural disaster, they’ll do a mass hire and they pay supposedly pretty well.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Yes.

SHAWN RYAN: So you got a bunch of people that got hired yesterday that are running things.

Government Preparedness and the Future of Catastrophic Threats

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Which, and again, the military is so interesting to me, always has been— how they function, how it’s a system of systems, flaws, weaknesses, strengths. The military has professional individuals who have a lot of experience doing what they’re doing.

To your point, when you have an organization that has attention on it very sporadically, you really have an organization of bureaucrats, pencil pushers, very straight-minded individuals who are not gifted, shall we say, with flexibility as a leading character. They’re really about organization, and then suddenly there’s a crisis. That’s a really mismatch of professionalism, which I think FEMA really drastically suffers from.

And yet in the event of these sort of mass catastrophes— they’re called complex catastrophes— the FEMA director calls it a “maximum of maximums” event. That’s really what they’re planning for behind the scenes. And yet so few of their people are actually equipped like military personnel. Again, this is just my opinion, having studied all of this. It seems like that needs a big reconfiguring.

The question is, of course, as we move into the future with science moving so fast, are these threats— weapons of mass destruction that hinge upon science, whether it’s nuclear, bio, drones— are they making us move faster toward a catastrophe? Maybe. They could also be working faster towards a solution.

And if so, what is the government doing to stay on top of that? What I think is happening is not much. Government’s consumed with all kinds of inside baseball problems, political tribalism. And the public’s consumed with what should be called speculative narratives and are instead being called conspiracy theories. So it’s just creating this extraordinary fracture, a further fracturing from solution toward more chaos.

Which is, again, I write these books because I really believe that being informed gives you lift. It gives you a little bit of height on being able to assess the situation about what’s best for you and your family. And it also takes away, in a big component, the doom and gloom inevitable. Because I don’t want to just think America is doomed and we’re just going downhill. I’m too much of a happy American to take that path.

SHAWN RYAN: Good. Am I alone? I have hope. There’s a lot of us. But I’m also prepared because I’ve seen too many things go sour in my previous life. I did get you a present.

A Special Gift

ANNIE JACOBSEN: I can’t remember. I’ve been talking. I can’t remember.

SHAWN RYAN: You can’t remember what?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Did I get a present?

SHAWN RYAN: I got you a present.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: You did get me a present? Yeah. Oh, okay.

SHAWN RYAN: Should I give it to you now?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Sure. I thought you said, “Did I give you a present?”

SHAWN RYAN: No, no, no.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Yeah, you got me Joe Kent’s Long Rifle Part 2.

SHAWN RYAN: I would love to give you Joe Kent’s Long Rifle.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: I have 2 young men who are like, “Mom, I hope you get the rifle from Sig.”

SHAWN RYAN: Unfortunately, the state you live in— wow, this is not— can’t do that. So here we go. This is the—

ANNIE JACOBSEN: You are kidding me. You are kidding me, Shawn. This is amazing. I am now prepared for bio—

SHAWN RYAN: There we go—

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Biological war scenario.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I don’t know about that. We might need to get some gas masks and some other things, maybe some water filtration. But you’re prepared for mass panic to defend your home now.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: This is pretty incredible. I’m really amazed. Thank you so much.

SHAWN RYAN: You’re welcome.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Sig.

SHAWN RYAN: So I got a friend over there. His name’s Jason. He’s VP of marketing. And he heard you were coming on and he loved the nuclear war scenario interview. So he wanted me to give that to you. It’s got the Sig flashlight on there, so you’re never in the dark. And the new Sig Romeo optic red dot. So you can skip right through a lot of fundamentals of shooting and just point and pull the trigger with that thing, put that red dot on there.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Well, I’m going to be sure to get a lot of lessons. And I do also know, and this is going to be like a subject of envy— the good kind of envy— from a number of people I know. So thank you so much.

SHAWN RYAN: You’re welcome.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: That is pretty incredible, Shawn.

SHAWN RYAN: We’ll do a little lesson after this.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Hopefully that would be— that’d be an honor. Literally my kids were— that was like a joke about the Joe Kent long gun, and that’s not far away. So I’m flustered. I’m amazed. Thank you, really. It takes a lot to fluster me.

Firearms, the Second Amendment, and the Pandemic

SHAWN RYAN: Is that your first firearm?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: I do have 2 firearms.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, nice, right?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: State, but not that one.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on. Well, I hope you enjoy it. When—

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Thank you so much. California is an interesting state in terms of all of that. But speaking of the pandemic, when the pandemic happened, every ammo shop ran out of ammo.

SHAWN RYAN: I remember seeing the lines of people in California that were arming themselves, and I remember being disgusted with the Second Amendment community because they were making fun of it. They were like, “These people shouldn’t even have firearms,” or “They’re basically Democrats getting firearms.” And I was just thinking, yeah, what the hell is wrong with you, man? Here you are complaining about Second Amendment rights and gun rights non-stop, all day and all night. And now you have the other side of the aisle that is trying to arm themselves and everybody’s on the same page. And you’re going to bastardize them for it?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: That’s incredible. That’s a great point. That gets into the sort of when people start having self-righteous indignation about when they shouldn’t. They should be like, “Congratulations.” I had an interesting story with a firearm. Okay, I’ve got to think if I can tell this. Okay. So I get jury duty in Los Angeles. Being a good citizen, I go to do my jury duty. This was several years ago.

SHAWN RYAN: This was before COVID. So I bet everyone was like, “Holy sh, Annie Jacobsen’s on jury duty with me.”

ANNIE JACOBSEN: No, no one. I’m in a room full of people who are all like, “Why am I here?” But so before COVID I didn’t own any firearms, but I did own a firearm because my grandfather was a captain in the Army who was behind enemy lines in what was then called Czechoslovakia, who became the guy in charge when the war ended and took a Luger off a Nazi and brought it home.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Okay.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: So this was in the possession of my mother. And then it was given to me to give to my son, one of my 2 sons. And it’s a really incredible artifact because they’re all identifiable to certain Nazis. And at the end, it comes with a certificate from the War Department. So it’s war booty, but you were allowed to actually have it. So it’s officially my grandfather’s. And now— okay, so it’s in our house.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Yeah, it’s incredible, right? Just as a piece of— I have his Purple Heart and his Luger.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, that is—

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Right?

SHAWN RYAN: What a great heirloom.

Jury Duty and the Firearm Question

ANNIE JACOBSEN: So there I am doing jury duty, and it’s a police brutality trial. And one of the questions that they’re asking as they’re trying to select jurors is who has a firearm. So I’m down here, being a good citizen, I’m under oath. Of course I raise my hand because I do. And by the way, this is before jury selection. So there’s 50 people in this room, in this courthouse, all of whom are under oath or the variation of that. I’m the only one who raises my hand as having a firearm.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

Guns, Pathogens, and the Limits of Containment

ANNIE JACOBSEN: And I was like, looking like, what? How is this even possible? And when I was home that night at dinner, I had this discussion with my kids and my husband, and they’re like, “Mom, everyone in LA has illegal guns. And they don’t want to admit it.” Now, I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s a very interesting observation. And what is true is that no one else raised their hand.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, maybe it’s a little—

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Maybe it’s a little, a little sort of perception versus reality, right? No one wanted to admit they had a firearm. I have no idea.

SHAWN RYAN: I could see it either way.

Wargaming Biological Attacks: Targets and Scenarios

SHAWN RYAN: When you talk to these people, what are the different scenarios? Do they have scenarios where it’s certain parts of the country? Do they have scenarios where they use the country to spread it globally? Where are the targets? I mean, obviously if you want to spread it globally, then you would definitely hit the airports, right? You would release it in the airports because people are constantly coming and going, and it would be impossible to trace it at that point. And it would spread like— I mean, if you wanted to hit it more locally and try to keep it contained, what would you hit? You would hit probably unfortunately schools. Grocery stores?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Well, a lot of early wargaming planning was predicated on precisely those kinds of scenarios, like what would happen, how would the targets disperse. In the past 20 years or so, with the advent, or rather the advancement, of genetic engineering, all of that no longer pretty much matters.

We saw this in COVID. Once an airborne pathogen— there used to only be a very few truly airborne pathogens that a medical countermeasure didn’t exist for. And so you would have to kind of do exactly what you’re talking about, like have multiple targets. This was the terrorist threat. But now that an airborne pathogen can be modified with ease, we saw in COVID that it just begins to spread naturally on its own. And if you shorten the window of contagion to death, you have one kind of effect. If you lengthen it— COVID had a lot of sort of what were silent carriers for a long time. Now it’s spreading in a different manner.

And so as a result, most of the war games have begun to focus on two things, which is first and foremost— and this is probably upsetting to a lot of people— how to keep infected people out of the United States of America.

There was one war game that I write about in particular. So I take the reader through the scenario and then I kind of stop for little history lessons about different war games. And one of them that was conducted in 2018 describes boats of migrants. There’s an outbreak in South America. So you’ve got all these panicked people leaving Venezuela in boats headed to Puerto Rico, hundreds of miles away. Okay, this is actually war-gamed out. You can read it online. And they have the CDC officials deciding what to— like, do we actually let them come on land? And the answer is no. And then the subtext is rules of engagement, right?

And then, of course, you have another debate within this war game about how to deal with the press. Like, “If we start shooting at migrants in boats, we’re going to have a real problem. It’s going to be all over the news.” And that kind of candor in planning for a biological incident was shocking to me because it really gets at the heart of the matter of the kind of ruthless fortressing that Homeland Security will immediately try to do if the pathogen is outside trying to come in.

But what you learn from the wargaming is that the pathogen is almost always certainly already here. I mean, remember when President Trump’s first administration— COVID happens, he closes the border with Europe, he restricts any flights from China, but the pathogen is already here. People have it in New York City. People have it in Seattle.

I did an interview with the former defense official in Italy, the defense minister, and he was telling— because there was a huge outbreak in Italy.

SHAWN RYAN: I remember.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Remember that? And you know why? It was because Milan, which is a fashion capital of the world, had Chinese individuals working in manufacturing— Milan to China. They had brought it to China. But another interesting fact I learned from the FEMA chief is that most of the initial cases of COVID in New York City were from Italy, not from Wuhan. And they can tell this through genetic testing later to determine the variants.

How COVID Spread: From Washington to New York

SHAWN RYAN: Did it start in New York or did it start in Washington?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: In the United States, the first cases were in Washington. But the real panic, the real “oh my God, it’s here” moments, was once New York City was infected. Because then people realized there’s no way to stop this because of movement.

I looked at bubonic plague, the Black Death, because bubonic plague becomes pneumonic plague in the lungs. And I wanted to show readers historically what has happened and what is possible. And what was interesting is I learned this very unique fact that pathogens travel at the rate at which humans move. So in the time of the Black Death in the 1300s and the 14th century, people moved by caravan, people moved by ship. So it was slow, right? Now people move by airplane. You can get from one side of the Earth to the other in 15 hours. That’s how fast things happen.

SHAWN RYAN: But they’re still going to attempt to isolate it.

Diagnostics, Quarantine, and the Role of Testing

ANNIE JACOBSEN: And I show that in the beginning of the book because this is where you have the epidemiologists. This is where you have public health officials. By no means do I mean to make everybody in government sound like some kind of incompetent bureaucrat. That is simply not the case.

The individuals that I interview— and I list them all in the front of the book, like the nuclear war book, so that people can see, “Wow, she’s talking to the top subject matter experts in public health, in defense, in federal emergency management”— extraordinarily competent, desperately trying to bring these different factions of the government together to pay attention to this threat, to actually take actions so that America is prepared for such a thing.

And I show their stories of how they have made progress, and then also where they are so failing. And the failures are always political.

SHAWN RYAN: What measures would they go through to isolate an incident?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Quarantine. It’s a super important question. Quarantine does exist, but before that, it’s all about diagnostics. We were talking about that a little bit earlier. Like, you went and had a COVID test, right? Now that has spiraled into its whole set of rabbit hole problems. But the diagnostics, the testing, are important because very few people realize that the doctor doesn’t know what he’s looking at. The doctor doesn’t know. You can walk in with a sneeze and a cough and the doctor doesn’t know.

Want me to give you an example that’s kind of easy to wrap your head around? Strep throat. Have you had strep throat recently?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: So strep throat— you go in like, “Doctor, my throat hurts.” They give you a strep test. Strep is a bacteria. Bacteria are killed by antibiotics. You go into the doctor, you say you have strep. They give you a strep test because strep is ubiquitous. The test often happens in the back of the doctor’s office. It takes 5 minutes for a strep test. When I was growing up in the ’70s, a strep test took 2 or 3 days. That’s science. When you were growing up, it probably took 10 minutes. Now it’s down to a couple minutes.

The minute the doctor knows you have strep throat bacteria, you are prescribed antibiotics. You usually drive to the local pharmacy on the way home from the doctor’s office. Certainly if your kids have strep, you want to get that antibiotic in them right away.

Now they’re fighting the pathogen. They’re not going to get more sick. They’re on the path to wellness.

You go in there for strep and the doctor gives you the strep test and it comes back negative because you have a virus, not strep. Antibiotics do nothing for a virus. That’s why the doctor sometimes says, “Go home and drink tea, take some Advil, call me tomorrow.” So that’s diagnostics. If you know what someone has, now you can begin to treat it.

So much of biowar is predicated on testing. People need— which is that dual-edged sword, because no one wants to give all their information to the government. So again, that would be another situation where people realize, “No, if there is an outbreak of something, testing actually helps you and your family.”

Government Containment: How Far Would They Go?

SHAWN RYAN: What lengths is the government willing to go to contain? I mean, we saw just in COVID— entering a department store, they got the thermometer gun where they’re taking your head temperature everywhere you go. And that was— I mean, at the time, if you were in a car wreck and you happened to have COVID, you died of COVID. So they overinflated the numbers and they made it sound worse. And I think it took a couple months for everybody to catch on, and I think the majority of people caught on relatively quickly.

And at least around here, that sh didn’t last very long. I looked at New York and you got people eating in inflatable bubbles in restaurants and everything shut down. And California, we’ve all heard the stories there.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Our governor closed our parks.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, we couldn’t go to the beach, get arrested for surfing, which is the place to go, by the way— fresh air.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: But keep going.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, so anyways, what I’m getting at is that was an overreaction to a virus that did minimal damage. What is the government willing to do for something like Ebola? Are they going to surround a city with the military? Are they going to have rules of engagement? Are they going to have an escalation of force? Are they going to kill people? What are they going to do?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Yes to every one of those questions.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

America’s Preparedness for Biological War

ANNIE JACOBSEN: So, and by the way, COVID was essentially a— I mean, a lot of people died, and to them it was a lot, obviously, to their family members. But in the scope of things, a pathogen with a 1% case fatality rate is nothing. And so if you have a select, a tier 1 select agent where you have a case fatality rate of 30%, 40%, 50%, or 100%, the extreme measures that the government will go to, there’s no such thing as too extreme.

Quarantine is— the president can— there are legally quarantinable diseases, and the president will absolutely declare a quarantine. So then the issue becomes, well, how do you enforce a quarantine, which is why the military comes in. And the military can only come in if they have— they have 2 lanes. The military can function under what is called defense support of civil authorities. And it’s just like it sounds. The Defense Department is supporting the states, the law enforcement. That’s when you see the National Guard come in. They do not have rules of engagement like the normal military because they’re in support of the governor.

When the Insurrection Act is declared, and it will be in a catastrophic biological event, the military has rules of engagement. Essentially, America is a war theater.

SHAWN RYAN: America is what?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: A war theater. And I did this really interesting—

SHAWN RYAN: It’s not going to work. You just said there’s 500 million guns in the country. Good luck.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: And so this is the kind of bloodbath. This is that quote from Tom Daschle, people doing inhuman things just to survive. And there are contingency plans in place. And what I learned is, of course, the tip of the iceberg. But it is enough that I describe in the scenario to, I think, really get people thinking, like, just like nuclear war, this is a catastrophic situation that we don’t even want to get even close to.

And so what are the solutions? What are the solutions? And I believe those are always there. When you read the worst-case possible scenario, you begin to be able to think in terms of solution because you’re aware of what can happen.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, nobody’s going to listen even if you do surround— even if you were to surround Nashville with military and the ROEs were to shoot anybody that’s leaving and you have something like Ebola break out, how would you rather die? Bleeding out from every orifice in your body or being shot and lights out immediately? I know which way I want to go.

COGCON and Continuity of Government

ANNIE JACOBSEN: I mean, this kind of maximum of maximum events is something that used to be very far afield in planning, I believe. In the Cold War, there was a real effort to push for what was called civil defense. It was this idea that you could save the population from itself. Essentially, that everybody would sort of go along to get along. And those days are completely over.

What is left is essentially what’s called continuity of government, COG. That’s the acronym. And it’s exactly like it sounds. The government must continue.

There’s another interesting detail I learned. You know about DEFCON, Defense Readiness Condition. And 5 is where we normally are. And then at 9/11, it went to 3. At nuclear war, it’s going to go to 1. That means nuclear war. 2 is like nuclear war. We don’t know because it’s classified whether we’ve ever gone to DEFCON 2, but DEFCON 3 was 9/11.

There is a similar civilian readiness condition that exists that FEMA’s in charge of— the agency many people have never heard of or aren’t sure what it does, the agency in charge of devolution. And it’s called COGCON. Again, completely classified program. The term itself has been declassified, which is why former FEMA Director Craig Fugate could discuss it with me. And there are 4 levels. And when COGCON 1 gets declared, that’s the triggering point for devolution.

So the situation you’re talking about is going to go in concert with DEFCON, as the situation ratchets up. And then once you hit COGCON 1, devolution protocols kick in, and then everybody leaves Washington, D.C. It’s called the National Capital Region. I love that there’s all this weird nomenclature that keeps the rest of us out. And I think, why is that? But it’s not called Washington, D.C. It’s called the National Capital Region. And everybody departs and goes to their bunkers, and the military moves into the states.

SHAWN RYAN: Not a great scenario. Let’s switch gears here real quick. I got a hot question for you.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: 100%.

The Baker Bomb: Bikini Atoll, 1946

SHAWN RYAN: July 25th, 1946, Bikini Atoll. Wow. There are only 7 atomic bombs on the entire planet, and the US is about to spend one blowing up its own ships underwater to see what happens. That bomb was called Baker, and it became the first time humanity really understood what fallout was. The ships that survived the blast were so radioactive, they had to abandon the cleanup because it was killing the sailors doing it. Bikini’s still uninhabitable today, 80 years later. Can you walk us through Baker? Because this is the moment we learned a nuke doesn’t just destroy, it poisons everything for generations.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Yeah, it’s a fascinating moment in time that’s being discussed there. And journalist detail, just because I have spent my life interviewing people who have actually been there, really, it’s what gives me a little bit of an authority. And I mean that as an author— I wasn’t there like you were in the war theater. I never have been, but I interviewed. So the man who wired that bomb, who wired the Baker bomb— he armed, wired, and fired it. His name is Alfred O’Donnell. He’s now dead, but I interviewed him for my book Area 51, which was sort of my first foray into nuclear weapons. And O’Donnell was with a small team of engineers called EG&G.

And so even more interesting is that O’Donnell walked me through— I said to him, how do you arm, wire, and fire a nuclear weapon? To which he said, “Well, that’s really classified, but I can give you the layman’s version of it.”

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Because that, by the way, is what prohibits most rogue groups from being able to acquire a nuclear weapon. They don’t have the arming and firing device. That’s what’s so jealously guarded. It’s incredibly complex. Al O’Donnell never left the country. He never left the country because he would be kidnapped. And he had a minder until he died, like an FBI minder keeping eyes on him, kind of always watching us whenever I was interviewing him, having lunch with him at the Chinese restaurant. He had a lot of secrets. He wired 186 nuclear weapons for the government in the Marshall Islands and in Nevada.

And what I learned about that Baker bomb is that in those days— we’ve been talking about how science and technology have advanced— there was no remote wiring system the way there is now. I mean, it did exist, but it wasn’t ubiquitous. So now you do this and you blow something up at a distance. So they had cables. If you’ve ever seen that photograph of that, it’s like ships in the atoll and you see this mushroom cloud coming up out of the water.

SHAWN RYAN: I have an actual—

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Oh, it’s an incredible photo.

SHAWN RYAN: We’ll put it up on screen.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Incredible photo. And O’Donnell took me through how they had to lay cables from the arming facility to the actual bomb.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. So how far were they?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: They were not far away. In those days, they would set the situation up. They had some remote control. So they would go out on a ship further out from the atoll, maybe 25 miles away. And they would do some remote firing, but the actual device had to be attached to its armed system onshore, which is just kind of an unfathomable detail in today’s world.

SHAWN RYAN: How was he psychologically? How many sailors died?

The Nuclear Arms Race and the Cold War Mindset

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Well, that was the first atomic test after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was a really pivotal moment in history because there was a kind of decision of like, maybe we’re going to sort of not go nuclear. And there was lots of debate in the international community whether it should be monitored. And the Navy stepped in and was like, we’re in business here. And then the nuclear arms race took off with that Baker bomb.

And there were more than 100 atmospheric nuclear tests that happened after that. And the size of that test, by the way, was tiny compared to what would come later because that was an atomic weapon. There was only atomic weaponry in those days. It wouldn’t be until the very early 1950s that the thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, would be invented. And the hydrogen bombs are what are megatons. The atomic weapons were still in the kiloton range. So while that bomb looks huge, as you’ll see in the photo, it’s not Castle Bravo or Ivy Mike, the megaton weapons that were going off later.

So psychologically, how was O’Donnell? It took a toll on those individuals, but they also were so conditioned— some might say programmed— to believe. And no, I’m going to say conditioned, because Russia was such a threat. I mean, totalitarian communism was just a looming threat, and everyone that worked within the military-industrial complex in those days knew it, was conditioned to be extremely fearful of it, and was determined to beat it. And people have their opinions now, but having interviewed a lot of Cold War warriors, I completely reserve judgment on that and just go with what they talk about, about how serious that threat was.

Is America Prepared for Biological War?

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Last question.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Is America prepared for biological war?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And biological war can never happen. This is what I would talk about with nuclear war, where I would say nuclear war is insane. And every person I ever interviewed told me that. And these are people in nuclear command and control that retired. You can never have a nuclear war. Civilization— it’s the endgame. And biological war is the same situation. It is an endgame. We cannot have one.

COVID needs to be reexamined as a lesson. What can we learn from this? And what can we never do again with those same mistakes? And how do we educate people so that they can have conversations like we’re having? Erring a little bit on the like, “Oh my God, this is a disaster,” so that you realize, how do I participate in the dialogue so that it can never happen? It can never happen. And that can be a specific different lane for all kinds of us, each one of us.

Some people will really take issue with gain-of-function. They’ll say that must be shut down. The current president has shut down gain-of-function research. And others— I mean, I didn’t even mention how many biosafety labs there are right now. We did speak about how before 9/11, there were 2 in America. There was one in Atlanta at the CDC and one at Fort Detrick. 2. Now there are 17 in America.

SHAWN RYAN: There’s 17?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: 17. There are 110 around the world in countries where there are wars going on. Ukraine. The BSL-3 labs, which are just 1 degree below— and by the way, you can work with anthrax, plague, hantavirus in BSL-3. There are 3,500 of them around the world. 90% of them have no safety protocols. They’re just working away without— and no organization tracks this. No government organization. Academics and scientists track this.

So you pick your lane once you know about this stuff. What do I want to pay attention to and kind of keep eyes on? Keeping track of what labs are doing what is a great starting place.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Well, my conclusion would be the government’s prepared themselves for it, but they haven’t done sh to prepare the rest of us. And they probably never will.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Or it’s considered such a rarefied problem. It’s a bit like the nuclear issue. Like, that’s never going to happen. But I do think that the COVID pandemic really has the potential, in a good way, to flip the switch on that ostrich-in-the-sand thinking. Before that, people could say, “Oh, come on, there hasn’t been a pandemic since the Spanish flu, the influenza pandemic of 1918. That’s of the past.” And COVID really was a wake-up call that you can just be caught completely off guard. You don’t want to be caught unaware.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Well, Annie, that was a fascinating discussion.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Always a pleasure.

SHAWN RYAN: Likewise. Thank you. No matter where you’re watching the Shawn Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you’re feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.

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