#323 Annie Jacobsen - Is America Ready for Biological War?

26:38Annie Jacobsen: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 gonna be the devolution POTUS, the national security advisor, the SecDef, right? So all of these individuals, and by the way, it's not just Defense Department, it's health... officials, it's, you know, 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?

27:33we'll get into that discussion it's called d d evolution evolution evolution evolution we don't know how often i mean is there there's a lot of conspiracies on who really runs the government they're running wild right now they ran wild on the last administration as well i mean probably every administration that comes uh there'll be this question you think there's a possibility that maybe they don't get picked? Maybe they're the ones that are running everything?

28:06Annie Jacobsen:You mean the actual devolution is already in effect and taking care of things? That I don't know. It's certainly an interesting thought experiment, you know? I mean, I also think conspiracy theory is such a bad term. I think it should be changed to speculative narrative. I love that. 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 just quietly changed the idea that COVID was airborne about a year later.

28:49Annie Jacobsen:So, and there's that. And then there was the lab leak component of things, which, separate from what you think about that, is a real possibility, okay? 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, you know, if you're talking about, 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.

29:35Annie Jacobsen:Because once you say that, you have a really tough time walking it back and admitting you're wrong. And that's my idea. I mean, the CIA created that term, correct? Conspiracy theory? Didn't they? I don't know that. I have heard many different things. Or is that a speculative narrative? Good. Look at that. Change the thinking and the way people talk right here and now on the Sean 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.

30:20Annie Jacobsen:I just really don't know. I mean, there's a famous JFK quote after the Bay of Pigs, which is a failure, okay? And JFK said something like, you know, I'm paraphrasing, like, 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, you know, 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, right? You got to be able to with your kids. I do it all the time publicly. I've had to do it two or three times this year, unfortunately.

31:14But, you know, 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 is because nobody has been able to admit wrong. And, you know, the funny thing is, you know, 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. Yes. Which we can't say for anybody in government because they never do. They're too proud. There's too much pride.

31:57Annie Jacobsen:Pride goeth before the fall. I mean, I just think about pride is ego, or the unhealthy part of ego. Maybe the healthy part of ego is uncertainty, you know, being able to say like, you know, I don't know, but I think it's this. I still cannot, I could not get a straight, I'm always trying to get a straight answer from government officials on these certain questions like that. like asking the CDC, why have you never admitted you were wrong about, you know, COVID not airborne? And they won't go there. So people mistrust. You've asked them. I always ask. What do they say? I mean, usually you get ignored on those questions, right?

32:42Annie Jacobsen:I mean, it's why I spend so much of my time interviewing former SecDef, you know, 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, you know, is understandable and some component, but it also should change because people, I think, are advancing way beyond that in their own personal lives.

33:24Annie Jacobsen: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. You know, we'll get back to you and answer on that, and then six weeks later, they're giving you the answer, and the question has already changed.

33:44what about what else about this devolution i mean it was was it was that a surprise to you

33:52Annie Jacobsen:yeah yeah i mean i've heard that term referenced but it's always it's it's 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, you know, there are other really, really interesting details I learned, like, okay, again spoiler alert right um the president gets moved in the event of a major biological catastrophe where people are there is a pathogen that has a case fatality rate of 100 percent i told you covid had one percent plague not bubonic plague but pneumonic plague which is is pneumonic pneumonia, so in the lungs.

35:04Annie Jacobsen:When plague goes into the lungs, 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. 100%. 100%. You get it, you die. Unless you take antibiotics. You have to take antibiotics within 24 hours. Within 24 hours. By the way, I have one of my major sources on the book is one of the world's experts on bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, Dr. Henry Hine. He was at USAMRED, which is at Fort Dietrich, studying this for a very long time until he left.

35:54Annie Jacobsen:Now he works privately. So all of this information is like fully sourced. But the big fear, I'm going looping back to the president here, big fear of Defense Department, CDC, HHS, all of these organizations would be involved in a bio event. 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.

36:34Annie Jacobsen:I'm sure there are. In this event, the president, I learned, this is like, 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 like 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 secret service agents watching the building.

37:28Annie Jacobsen:For how long? I mean, that to me sounds like science fiction, to realize it's science fact is like, I gotta know about this. And that's how I work as a reporter. Like, okay, so how does that happen?

37:48I mean, who... Are there, you know...

37:54Annie Jacobsen:That's the end of democracy. Yeah, I'd like to go back a little bit and talk about maybe the biological arms race before we get to this. But who do they think they're going to even govern? You know, I mean, the trillionaires that are building, the billionaires and trillionaire that are building bunkers in Hawaii. What are they going to do? Come out of your bunker and do what? What, are you going to govern Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg? I don't think so. They're not being governed right now. And you got to think of the skills you have to have to survive in that kind of a world. Okay, so biological armsways.

38:34Annie Jacobsen:Here's an interesting fact. Biological war is illegal. Biological weapons are illegal. Nuclear weapons are not illegal. Crazy thought, okay? Okay, 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.

39:21Annie Jacobsen:That's Cold War paranoia for you. We had them. Russia had them. China was building them. North Korea. So they became illegal. President Nixon decided they're repugnant to the conscience of mankind. That's what he said. Okay? And makes them illegal. We destroyed our biological weapons. It took 219 weeks to destroy them, by the way. So everybody says we're going to destroy our weapons. biological weapons. Everybody signs the treaty. Not for another 20 years would the United States learn from Soviet defector scientists that the Russians went like this. Oh yeah, here, we signed that treaty. And then they began to build a colossal biological weapons program.

40:12Annie Jacobsen:They called it their Manhattan Project. And the idea, which is so spooky, is that they wanted to to kill all the people in America and the West and leave the infrastructure intact." Those were their words. Interesting. Smart and interesting and evil. I mean, you know, we were talking about Ancestry.com, 23andMe. Yeah. Who knows what else is out there that people are using, but I mean, what do you say, an arsenal of biological... How many different types of biological weapons do you need? I mean, can they, I mean, I'm sure they can. I mean, can they, you know, by sucking that DNA out? Or LabCorp, you know, the biggest blood diagnostics company in the world.

41:02I mean, 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 most multiple times. Allegedly. But, uh... Is it possible to create a biological weapon that would only target... American DNA, Canadian DNA, North American DNA, Latino DNA, Black DNA? Yeah. Any race?

41:38Annie Jacobsen:There is. And that, by the way, this is not something I get into in the book. It was a little too speculative narrative for me to really go down, okay? But let me tell you who took. That was confirmed. 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. Okay? He's also a medical doctor. He ran DARPA's bioscience office. He's an incredible human being. He's a character in the book, for sure. I mean, he's really a remarkable person. You know, grew up in a small town in Texas. First guy in his town to go to Harvard.

42:25Annie Jacobsen:You know, 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 for Annie 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 like, fear mong... Like, if I were to go down that lane, perhaps people would say, well, you're fear mongering because it's speculative because you don't know for sure.

43:05Right?

43:06Annie Jacobsen:Now, when you have someone like Admiral Giroir saying it's speculative, the subtext in that, you and I can infer what that means. 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. So there's speculative rumors that China is creating this or has created it. Yes. Yes. And there is also... I've never been so happy to have Asian blood. Yes. Really? How is that? You got to tell me that. How is that? Because I'm part Japanese. Wow. I'm good. I never knew that. Mom or dad? Dad. Dad. Interesting. Okay, so you got the DNA immunity, perhaps, if that's the case.

43:58Annie Jacobsen:There's a very interesting paper for anyone who's interested in reading on this. So Dr. Robert Kadlik, source in the book, he is now the current administration, essentially the biodefense chief. He was dedicated to biodefense starting in the Bush administration, 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. So he, you know, we had conversation before, and then when you go back into the administration, you can't really talk to a journalist like me.

44:44Annie Jacobsen: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? They say maybe. I'm sorry, what was the Wuhan lab? So here's... Maybe? And again, we're talking about language. What about Ukraine? We're talking about language. Well, those are our biolabs. 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.

45:42Annie Jacobsen:And so that is why they take the position Russia still has a program. And China, so let me, this is how a diplomat would clarify maybe. that the treaty I told you about, the BWC, which everybody is supposed to adhere to, all the 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-do, which allows these BSL-4 labs, biosafety level four, 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 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?

47:12Annie Jacobsen:Those three components. Gain of function tweaks those. Okay, so let's make it more airborne. Let's make it from droplet transmission, which would be me coughing at you and, you know, sorry for 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. Airborne, it's still here. That's the number one threat. You can, with gain-of-function genetic engineering, you can make a pathogen airborne. Whoa.

47:50What are the different kinds, do you know?

47:52Annie Jacobsen:Of pathogens? Of bioweapons. Pathogens, bioweapons. Yeah, I mean, great question. And again, stuff we should know about, right? Because then we, the public, can react appropriately as opposed to starting creating speculative narratives about what could happen. Ebola, for example, you know, 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. Subtexts have been weaponized in the past. They probably have speculative intelligence are being weaponized. Plague is one of them. Why? 100 % death rate if you don't have antibiotics.

48:37Annie Jacobsen:Anthrax is another. Ebola is another because it's got fear factor. Ebola is not airborne. But what if you could tweak Ebola to be airborne? What does Ebola do to you? Ebola is called a hemorrhagic fever virus, right? So think of what hemorrhaging is. You're just bleeding. It's 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. It's you get Ebola from close contract. If there's somebody over there in that corner bleeding out, you know, if you're a first responder, you may go help them.

49:34Annie Jacobsen: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's again takes us back to transmissibility. It takes us to virulence. Ebola is a 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. cadillac worked with with warp speed doctors got at it they created in san diego a medical countermeasure called z map so when one ebola patient arrived in texas in 2014 and gave his two nurses ebola he died because he was further along those two nurses in this heroics that is completely unknown but involves dr admiral gerard which is why i know the story he knew about the ZMAP medical countermeasure being developed in San Diego.

50:49Annie Jacobsen: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 ZMAP, brought it back, gave it to the nurses. They lived. Wow. Now this new form of Ebola in Africa has mutated and the ZMAP 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 grows and becomes bigger? Who knows? Will that epidemic be able to be contained and put out? I've always liked gear that feels simple, well made and built with some character. That's what Takovas does well.

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53:06Annie Jacobsen:Me? I mean. This is what 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? Well, 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, 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.

53:46They had created a super plague weapon, airborne, with plans to be genetically modified.

53:54Annie Jacobsen:This is early genetic engineering, almost like 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 Russian, 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 antibiotics. 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.

54:50Annie Jacobsen: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 myself. 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.

55:39Wow.

55:43I don't, you know... 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, oh, we can't, you know what I mean? Nobody in North America can reproduce anymore. And... 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.

56:29If 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. that everybody's, they know, you know, 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.

57:05Annie 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 this, what's interesting about this is that is all very valuable. And that's sort of historical red teaming and war gaming. But what has been left out of the discussion are two 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 group, the three-stage thing is like really sinister and, you know, very scientific.

58:01Well, it also gives them the option to save themselves.

58:06Annie Jacobsen:Explain to me that a little bit more on the third part of it. On my plan? Yeah, yeah, yeah. My plan is you get the attention. Okay. Everybody knows something's up. Then you take credit for what's happening. Okay. It's the bad guy. Yeah. It's the bad guy. Or the good guy. Okay. I mean, maybe there is genocide going on somewhere in the world. Okay. Like we see all over right now, right? And then the country that's committing genocide gets a pathogen. It makes their people sick. They're not dying. Maybe some die. You know what I mean? 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.

58:50If the genocide continues, then we'll move to stage two. Stage two is you bleed out of every orifice in your body. Would you like that to happen? Yes or no? You have two hours.

59:04Annie Jacobsen:And this is... Two 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 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. Well, that's dependent if you target a certain race of people that all share a common strand of DNA. Yes. And this is exactly what that Cold War mentality was, by the way, right? It was really, it's almost like mental, you know, hostage taking essentially on a grand scale.

59:59Annie Jacobsen:And then the conclusion by pretty much everyone involved was the blowback idea, was that you couldn't contain it because the pathogen would have to be contagious to be, you know, really effective. And then you would have these co-centric circles of people getting sick. So, that's where kind of 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.

1:00:51In Dr.

1:00:53Annie Jacobsen:Kadlik'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 are actually programs in place for precisely the kind of warfare that you're talking about. I mean, this is what God did to the Egyptians in the Old Testament, correct? It is a narrative that has existed. it and it's like you know where does it go the the the argument not to have that is it's too evil and it's it has the consequences are too great hence the idea that is you know odious to the nature of mankind so the bigger idea that i think we're getting to is like so what is the solution if all of this is possible what is the solution and right now we're kind of i think stuck in this idea of like, well, the debate is really only on the gain of function, right?

1:02:08Annie Jacobsen:The debate is like, we need, 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, you know, if 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.

1:02:59that involve tweaking the virulence, the transmissibility,

1:03:05Annie Jacobsen: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?

1:03:30So, does the government have any countermeasures for the citizens of this country or is it just for themselves?

1:03:38Annie Jacobsen:Well, the countermeasure question, the reason why I use that Soviet sort of evil concept, it's called a chimera weapon, bioweapon. The chimera is this ancient Greek monster. You've seen images of it. Like think of the head of a lion and the tail of a serpent with a goat coming out of it. A chimera just means like 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 that would – you take the antidote and it turns into a booby trap and it kills you.

1:04:25Annie Jacobsen:So, you know, 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 gonna 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, this is, you can't just go down the evil rabbit hole of the military, you know, 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 are like, it's all about diagnostics.

1:05:13Annie Jacobsen:Diagnostics, fancy word for testing, you know. I mean, remember in COVID, by the end of COVID year two, 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? We may have. I don't know. The test didn't work. 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 know whatever. and um but my wife was pregnant at the time nobody really knew what the hell was going on and um and uh so i did i did get tested and i took two tests and one was positive and one was negative and the speculative narratives were correct i did get calls and wow you took them at like a urgent care?

1:06:13Yeah, I took it at an urgent care. Wow.

1:06:15Annie Jacobsen:Yeah. And, you know, so I never took another, and that was before, 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 have the over-the-counter tests at that particular point in time, which would have been around 2021. So in big cities, they were... You could suddenly literally buy a dip... 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.

1:07:10Annie Jacobsen:So then, you were supposed to work on the honor system of 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 some groups of people, and I don't care.

1:08:02Annie Jacobsen:Which is that, so there's a, after 9-11, Dick Cheney himself was like personally terrified of bioweapons. And he was part and parcel to this extreme elevation, escalation, I mean, of, you know, gain of function of medical countermeasures, of opening up more biosecurity level four labs, of all of the 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.

1:08:49Um...

1:08:50Annie Jacobsen:Okay. Um... Literally. That's a given. Okay, so it created an entire industry about biodefense. And one of the results of that was there is, many people don't know about this, there is something called the National Syndromic Syndrome 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.

1:09:51Annie Jacobsen:the goal of which was to create stop a pandemic if it happens well how did that work out in covid not well but a little loophole i found in it which is you know when 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 the world's or america's most senior epidemiologists people who are trying to prevent, like, outbreaks from taking over. And 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.

1:10:39Annie Jacobsen: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. With the last two books you've written, I cannot believe you're still living in Los Angeles. You got to get out to the woods, Annie.

1:11:25Annie Jacobsen:I mean, driving around here, it's very beautiful, I have to say. We get a little walking around room out here. Mm-hmm.

1:11:36Annie Jacobsen:But, you know, 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.

1:12:00Annie Jacobsen: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, he said to me, we were talking about nuclear war versus biowar, and he said to me, unlike nuclear war, biological war will be perhaps more terrifying because, And then he said, yes, it will be death physically, death governmentally, death of everything we know in America.

1:13:11Annie Jacobsen:But most horrifying is it will be, this is his quote, people doing inhuman things to other people just to survive. And that's that kind of desperation. This happens in pretty much any event. I mean, eventually people can deal with hunger, thirst, disease. Absolutely. Financial collapse. And so out in the country, in the city, you know, 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. You know, if nuclear war was about we need to have this conversation while we can still have it, bio is about stay informed, you know, because there is there are actions that people have to take in the event that this kind of a situation happens.

1:14:16Annie Jacobsen:Period. Full stop. I mean, we you could look 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, you know, tribal anger about, you know, 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. 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. I have not heard that one.

1:15:13Annie Jacobsen:The speculative narrative on that is that it's internal, domestic, or external. I don't know. It could be both, you know? could be none but uh but i mean a lot of those narratives running around i mean they wanted to see how the people reacted and if they if they basically if they listen to the government or if they do not listen to the government and uh you know 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... They learned, are we going to stay in our homes?

1:16:00How long are we going to stay in our homes? How long are we going to buy this bullshit? You know, they collected a lot of information there.

1:16:10Annie 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, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, current secretary, RFK Jr. Okay? An organization that most people have never heard of that has a budget, an annual budget, twice that of the Defense Department.

1:17:09Really? Twice that?

1:17:11Annie Jacobsen:Twice. $1.7 or$8 trillion is HHS. Defense Department is about$900 million. And yet, people don't even know what – the CDC answers to HHS. HHS the NIH the National Institute of Health answers to HHS the FDA answers to HHS

1:17:40Annie Jacobsen:another situation I'm always fond of is like 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 crazy that it 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. Really? Why is that? I mean, there's a line I write in the book, like kind of at the midpoint where I'm like, where I, you know, and again, I take you through what happens.

1:18:33Annie Jacobsen:I take you, you know, the Defense Department trying to figure out what's going on, what's happened. I start the inciting incident in the book is 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 in the – the cover-up begins and I've got – I show you – I show readers how the Defense Department will be immediately eyes on trying to figure out what's going on.

1:19:24They will work with the State Department to try and get information.

1:19:27Annie Jacobsen: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. Do you think they wanted to shut that down? COVID? The big, you mean the China... You think they wanted to contain it?

1:20:10Annie 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. Well, we already know. I mean, we already discussed the loopholes, you know. We already discussed the loopholes. So, 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, you know, patent is up on, we don't produce it.

1:21:04We don't care about actual people. We just care about money here. And so they produce all that stuff.

1:21:13Annie 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, you know, manufacturing changes going on. Even when COVID happened, you know, 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 fucking masks that are supposed to protect us. And we're just putting this shit on hook, line, and sinker, buddy.

1:21:51Like, oh, yeah, cool. They're the ones that released the thing that leaked the virus. And now they're gonna give us masks. We can't even make our own fucking masks.

1:22:03Annie 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, you know... When I was reporting the book at the very tail end of COVID, I went to a BSL-3 lab to, you know, see what it was like. And these are former USAMRID doctors. Usamrit is the US Army Medical Research of Infection. You know, 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.

1:22:51You get an actual lesson in how to wear it,

1:22:55Annie Jacobsen:and it's suggested that you... that it is only going to work for 15 minutes. And that's an N95 mask. Those were gone in about two days. So the other kind of masks are essentially almost useless. And I think that kind of... That's why we were wearing two of them. I mean, I wasn't. People were wearing dirty masks, you know? And sometimes you still see people walking around Los Angeles. That's a great looking face diaper you got on there. But that 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 like shaking their head and going, but afraid to speak out because they're going to be called, you know...

1:23:41Be ostracized.

1:23:42Annie Jacobsen:So this was just, again, a dangerous situation from which extraordinary lessons could have been learned and were not.

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1:26:44Let's get back to biological warfare. So what does the panic look like? Did you talk to people? What that kind of desperation, that panic, what would it do to society? How fast would it happen?

1:27:03Annie Jacobsen:It happens so fast. So I like to try and look at specifics again to keep the narrative on actual documentation. So we spoke a little bit earlier 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 and 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, that have 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.

1:27:54Annie Jacobsen: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, I learned, and they also happen at the state level. And so Los Angeles state and county, California state and Los Angeles county officials get like 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. You know, 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.

1:28:49Annie Jacobsen: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. 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 of cipro, ciprofloxacin, which is antibiotic stash. 100 ,000? 100 ,000 bottles. How many people does that treat? For the city officials. And I break it down of who it goes to. And so you've got like 16 ,000 bottles going to first responders. Obviously they need it.

1:29:38Annie Jacobsen:And then, like, a bunch of them going to, like, the zoo officials, you know, and the cultural affairs officials. I mean, I'm not kidding. I gave 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, like, died tragically last month in a car accident. Oh, man. 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.

1:30:17Annie Jacobsen: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, like, 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. And the hundred bottles of Cipro, I also learned, have this like wacky program attached to it. And I was going somewhere in this, which is where you're asking, where is the hole for insurrection and anarchy that the Defense Department and their documents is so worried about?

1:31:00Annie Jacobsen: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 perfect example that would repeat around the country. So this 100 bottle supply gets dispersed by volunteers. How does that work? How do you have – imagine if you had a biological incident where you've got pneumonic plague with 100 % death rate, no known cure, airborne, killing homeless people, you know, 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.

1:31:43Annie Jacobsen: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. That's, so you can see, that's where insurrection and anarchy happens.

1:32:27Annie Jacobsen:That's the Daschle quote. people doing inhuman things just to survive. And by the way, not from Annie Jacobson's imagination, looking at declassified or unclassified war games that game this out show that is exactly what happened. People begin to kill one another over perceived medical countermeasures. It's a grim story. I mean, I think it's pretty... I don't think people think about it, But I mean, 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, you know, where there is not really much social hierarchy.

1:33:19Everybody's on the same playing field. You know what I mean?

1:33:22Annie Jacobsen:Yeah. And so it will 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. The devolution component of that that was stunning to me was that what the Defense Department prepares for. So what's interesting is I mentioned before that HHS is in charge of this when it happens. But very quickly, HHS realizes in its 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 you're talking about 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 that i mentioned earlier my god like not since world war 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 sort of the insurrection that will be unfolding as people begin to panic?

1:34:52I mean, maybe they would be happy.

1:34:55Annie Jacobsen:Well, I think a lot of people would be happy because not everybody's criminally minded, okay? And are gonna be thinking, help is on the way. Well, I mean, how is the military gonna treat the infected? And that's where it gets... Especially if they don't have an antidote. So the military, I learned, and you probably know this, has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its personnel. So you have, imagine, so the military are protected. And now you have another situation, which is the mask becomes a coveted item. So now you have president declaring an insurrection act so that posse comitatis can be overridden.

1:35:48Annie Jacobsen:posse comitatis, the act after the Civil War that prohibits the military from carrying out law enforcement measures in the United States. That gets repealed with Insurrection Act. It's the only act that can do that. The president has the authority to declare it whenever he chooses. Okay? So the Insurrection Act gets laid down, and now military can act with those orders, same as in a war theater. So 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.

1:36:39And then you realize that with shoot to kill orders

1:36:43Annie Jacobsen:and the fact that the devolution plan calls for the crit... 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 electrical grid. Water treatment plants. Water treatment. waste waste 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 where you begin to see what unfolds and how it is sort of almost inevitable, the outcome of devolution.

1:37:51Annie Jacobsen:Because the center can't hold, because the people cannot... The people do not know what is happening to them and have no way of understanding what lies ahead. I mean, if you want a small, like a small window, like a very small window of what that looks like, you can go... 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. What was that experience like for you with a hurricane? I mean, it was... Was there kind of like some anarchy going on? I mean, I would not say anarchy at all, but, I mean, there are...

1:38:38There are, and I've always, you know what I used to do, so I'm pretty prepared. And I always have been. But you're looking at gas lines that are hours and hours long. You're looking at, you know, and 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, you know what I mean? 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 X 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 generator.

1:39:33She's got a new shipment of generators. And the last hurricane that went there, 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 Atlantic, Georgia. The entire route.

1:39:49Annie Jacobsen:Everybody trying to get out. Everybody trying to get out of Dodge. Everybody's trying to funnel out, you know, on a couple of highways. And it's stop and go traffic. People are, they run out of gas. They're pulled over on the side of the road. Everybody's hoarding. I mean, the grocery store is legitimate. They're empty in 24 hours. Were people behaving, like, were they following traffic laws? Were people driving on the grass? I mean, it's bottlenecked. It's bottlenecked. There are no traffic laws. I mean, you can't get anywhere. It's gridlocked. Wow. You know, I mean, a gas line, I mean, will go all the way down the interstate.

1:40:28Annie Jacobsen:So let me ask you, FEMA. That's a hurricane. Yes. That's a hurricane. That's a hurricane. And that hurricane didn't even mess. It was like a joke. I think it was Hurricane Matthew. Then you have all these memes everywhere that mass panic. Hurricane doesn't even hit. Wow. And I think it was Matthew. I could be mistaken. And then you see all these memes like the days after I show like a lawn chair flipped upside down. We will rebuild. The threat of hurricane was even as compulsive as a hurricane itself. Yeah, just the threat. Wow. I mean, I... What were we calling it? Speculative narratives. You know, I mean, I have that speculative narrative that, I mean, maybe these corporations are paying the news cycles to overhype this because the amount of revenue that happens instantaneously for everything, booze, cigarettes, gas, generators, everything, plywood, water, bullets, guns.

1:41:44Bullets. People get worried that it's going to last forever, and they go stock up on bullets. They go buy their first AR-15.

1:41:55Annie Jacobsen:Was there any sight of FEMA? The Federal Emergency Management Agency? No. No. Because FEMA, what do you think about FEMA? Well, I don't really know much about it. I don't think they come in until afterwards, right? Yes. But I've never had any experience with FEMA. But 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. I mean, those FEMA's all... 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...

1:42:36Annie Jacobsen:Yes. ...supposedly pretty well. Yes. So, you got a bunch of people that are, you know, got hired yesterday that are running shit. Which, and again, like, the military is so interesting... to me always has been how they function, how it's a system of systems, flaws, weaknesses, strengths. But the military has professional individuals who have a lot of experience doing what they're doing. And to your point, when you have an organization that has attention on it very sporadically, you really have an organization of bureaucrats, you know, sort of pencil pushers, like very sort of straight-minded individuals who are not gifted, shall we say, with flexibility as a leading care.

1:43:27They're really about organization.

1:43:30Annie Jacobsen:And then suddenly there's a crisis. That's a really a mismatch of professionalism, which I think FEMA really drastically suffers from. And yet it's in the event of these sort of mass catastrophe. 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. And again, this is just my opinion, having studied all of this. Seems like that needs a big reconfiguring.

1:44:15Annie Jacobsen:The question is, of course, as we move into the future with science moving so fast? Are these threats, weapons of mass destruction that sort of hinge upon science, whether it's nuclear, bio, drones, are they making us move faster into toward a catastrophe? Maybe they could also be working faster toward solution. And if so, what is the government doing to kind of stay on top of that? And what I think is happening is not much. Government's consumed with, you know, 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.

1:45:06Annie Jacobsen:So it's just creating this extraordinary fracture, a further fracturing from solution toward more chaos. Which is, you know, again, I write these books because I really believe that being informed, it 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, it takes away in a big component, I think, at least of like doom and gloom inevitable. Because I don't want to just think America is doomed and we're just going downhill. I just, I'm too much of a happy American to take that path. Good. Am I alone?

1:45:58I have hope. There's a lot of us. But I'm also prepared.

1:46:04Annie Jacobsen:Mm-hmm. because I've seen too many things go sour in my previous life. I did get you a present. I can't remember. I've been talking. I can't remember. You can't remember what? Did I get a present? I got you a present. You did get me a present. Yeah. Oh, okay. Should I give it to you now? Sure. I thought you said, did I give you a present? No, no, no. Yeah. Yes, I got you something. You got me Joe Kent's long rifle, part two. I would love to get you Joe Kent's long rifle. I have two young men who are like, Mom, I hope you get the long rifle from Sig. Unfortunately, the state you live in... What?

1:46:48Annie Jacobsen:Wow, this is not far away. You're kidding me? Here we go. You are kidding me. Sig P365. You are kidding me. Sean, this is amazing. I am now prepared for biological war scenario. 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. This is pretty incredible. I'm really amazed. Thank you so much. you're welcome sig so i got a friend over there his name's jason he's vp of marketing and uh 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 so you're not ever in the dark and uh the new sig romeo optic red dot so so you can fix a lot of you can 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.

1:47:52Annie Jacobsen:Well, I'm going to be sure to get a lot of lessons, and I do also know 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. You're welcome. Thank you. That is pretty incredible, Sean. We'll do a little lesson after this, hopefully. Yes, that would be an honor.

1:48:13Annie Jacobsen: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, so, right? Is that your first firearm? I do have two firearms. Oh, nice. Right? But not that one. Right on. Yeah. Well, I hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much, you know. I mean, California is an interesting state in terms of all of that. But speaking of the pandemic, when the pandemic happened, Like, every ammo shop ran out of ammo. 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.

1:49:05And they were like, these people shouldn't even have firearms. They're basically Democrats getting firearms. And I was just, I'm thinking like, what the hell is wrong with you man like I mean 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

1:49:39Annie Jacobsen:that's a great point right that's like that gets into the sort of when people start having self-righteous indignation about when they shouldn't, they should be like, congratulations, you know? I had an interesting story with a firearm. Okay, I'm gonna think if I can tell this. Okay. 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. This was before COVID. So before - I bet everyone was like, holy shit, Annie Jacobson's on jury duty with me. No, no one, you know, I'm like in a room full of people who are all like, why am I here, okay?

1:50:18Annie Jacobsen:But, um, 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 like the guy in charge when the war ended and took a Luger off a Nazi and brought it home. Wow. Okay? So this was in the possession of my mother, and then it was given to me to give to my son, one of my two sons. And it's a really incredible artifact because it actually, like, 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.

1:51:17Annie Jacobsen:So it's officially my grandfather's. And now, okay, so it's in our house. Wow. Yeah, it's incredible, right? Just as a piece of, you know, I have his Purple Heart and his Luger. Man, that is... Right? What a great heirloom. So there I am doing jury duty, and it's a police brutality trial.

1:51:41Annie Jacobsen:And one of the questions that they're asking as they're trying to select jurors is who has a firearm, right? So I'm down here. I'm like, okay, being a good citizen, I'm under oath, you know. 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 under oath or the variation of that okay i'm the only one who raises my hand of having a firearm wow 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.

1:52:35Annie Jacobsen:And what is true is that no one else raised their hand. Man.

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1:55:41When you talk to these people, I mean, 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? It's what, you know, I mean, obviously if you want to spread, I mean, if it was me and I wanted to spread one globally, then I would definitely obviously hit the airports, right? You would release it in the airports because people are constantly coming and going and it would be impossible for, to be able to trace it at that point. And it would spread like, I mean, with all, if you wanted to hit it more locally and try to keep it contained, I guess, what would you hit?

1:56:24you would hit probably, unfortunately, schools, grocery stores.

1:56:32Annie 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. And we saw this in COVID. It wants an airborne pathogen, right? So 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.

1:57:28Annie Jacobsen:And if you shorten the window of, you know, contagion to death, you have one kind of effect. If you lengthen it, right, so 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 like first and foremost, and this is probably upsetting to a lot of people, is 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 like little history lessons about different war games.

1:58:09Annie Jacobsen: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 do. Like, do we actually let them come on land? And the answer is no. And then the subtext is... rules of engagement. Right? Now that is... 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 gonna have a real problem.

1:59:04Annie Jacobsen:It's gonna be all over, you know, 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 sort of ruthless sort of, you know, 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's, you know, restricted any flights from China. But the pathogen is already here.

1:59:45Annie Jacobsen: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. I remember. Remember that? And you know why? It was because in Milan, which is a fashion capital of the world, had Chinese, you know, 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 all 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.

2:00:31Did it start in New York or did it start in Washington?

2:00:33Annie Jacobsen:In the United States the first cases were in Washington. But the real panic, the sort of like, oh my god, it's here moments, was once New York City was infected. Oh, God. Because then people realized there's no way to stop this, because of movement, you know. I looked at bubonic plague, the Black Death, the plague of 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, you know, I learned this very unique fact that, of course, pathogens travel at the rate at which humans move.

2:01:14Annie Jacobsen:So in the time of the Black Death, in the 1300s, in the 14th century, people moved by caravan. People moved by ship. So it was, like, slow, right? Now people move by airplane. You know, you can get from one side of the Earth to the other in 15 hours. That's how fast things happen. but they're still going to attempt to Isolated. 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. This is where you have... By the way, I mean, by no means do I mean to make everybody in government sound like, you know, some kind of incompetent bureaucrat.

2:01:58Annie Jacobsen:That is simply not the case. The individuals that I interview, and I list them all in the front of the book, like COVID, I mean, like the nuclear war book, so that people can see, wow, you know, she's talking to the top subject matter experts in public health, in defense, in federal emergency management. Extraordinarily competent people desperately trying, literally, to, you know, 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 that they tell me of like how the good part of that, of like how they have made progress, and then also where they are so failing.

2:02:48Annie Jacobsen:And the failures are always political. What measures would they go through to isolate an incident? So one of the first... 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 testings 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.

2:03:31Annie Jacobsen:That's why the doctor will say, I think you have... Okay, want me to give you an example that's kind of easy to wrap your head around? Okay, strep throat. Have you had strep throat? Yeah. Recently? No. Okay. So, strep throat, you know, 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 i have i have a strep they give you a strep test because strep is ubiquitous the test often happens in the back of the doctor's office takes five minutes for a strep test when i was growing up in the 70s, a strep test took two or three days.

2:04:21Annie Jacobsen:That's science. When you were growing up, it probably took 10 minutes, okay? 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, okay? 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.

2:05:00Annie Jacobsen:Antibiotics do nothing for a virus. That's why the doctor sometimes says, go home and drink tea. You know, take some Advil. Call me tomorrow. So that's diagnostics. If you know what someone has now you can begin to treat it so so much of bio war is predicated on testing it's predicated on testing people need which is that dual-edged sword because no one wants to like 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 what what What is the... What lengths is the government willing to go to contain?

2:05:49You know, I mean, we saw just in COVID, I mean, entering a department store, entering, they got the thermometer gun where they're...

2:05:59Annie Jacobsen:Yeah. Taking your head temperature, you know what I mean? Everywhere you go. And that was, I mean, at the time, you know, everything... If you were in a car wreck and you happen to have COVID, you died of COVID. so they overinflated the numbers and it 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 you know at least around here that didn't last very long yeah look at new york and you got people eating in bubbles like inflatable bubbles and restaurants and everything shut down and california uh We've all heard the stories there.

2:06:42Annie Jacobsen:Our governor closed our parks. Yeah. We couldn't go to the beach, get arrested for surfing. Which is the place to go, by the way, like fresh air, but keep going. But, you know, so anyways, what I'm getting at is that was, I mean, that was 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? Yes to every one of those questions. And by the way, COVID was essentially a, I mean, a lot of people died.

2:07:31Annie Jacobsen: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 tier one select agent where you have a case fatality rate of 30%, 50 % or 100%, the extreme measures that the government will go to, there's no such thing as too extreme. 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 two lanes. The military can function under what is called defense support of civil authorities.

2:08:34Annie Jacobsen: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 and america's what a war theater you know and i did this really interesting it's not gonna work you just said there's 500 million guns in the country good luck 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.

2:09:46Annie Jacobsen: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.

2:10:03I mean, nobody's gonna 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 slides out immediately? I know which way I want to go.

2:10:31Annie Jacobsen:I mean, this is, you know, this kind of maximum of maximum events is something that used to be very far afield in planning, I believe. You know, it was kind of in the Cold War, there was a real effort to push for what was called civil defense. You know, 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. And 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. You know, there's another interesting detail I learned.

2:11:24Annie Jacobsen:So you know about DEFCON, Defense Readiness Condition. And, you know, 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 is 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 cog con 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 four levels and when cog con one gets declared that's the triggering point for devolution.

2:12:29Annie Jacobsen:So the situation you're talking about is going to go in concert with DEFCON, you know, as the situation ratchets up. And then once you hit COGCON 1, devolution protocols, and then everybody leaves Washington, D.C. It's called the National Capital Regional. I love that there are all this weird nomenclature that like keeps the rest of us out. And I think, you know, 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. Not a great scenario.

2:13:14Let's switch gears here real quick. I've got a hot question for you.

2:13:18Annie Jacobsen:100 percent. July 25th, 1946. Bikini Atoll. Wow. There are only seven 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." Yeah, it's a fascinating moment in time that's being discussed there.

2:14:08Annie Jacobsen: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, like, as an author. You know, I wasn't there. Like, you were in the war theater. I never have been, but I interviewed people. 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.

2:14:52Annie Jacobsen:And so even more interesting is that O'Donnell walked me through, like I said to him, how do you wire, arm, 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, okay? 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 mind or keeping eyes on him, kind of always watching us whenever I was interviewing him, having lunch with him at the Chinese restaurant.

2:15:48Annie Jacobsen: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 There was no remote wiring system the way there is now. I mean, it did exist, but it wasn't ubiquitous, right? So now you do this and you blow something up at a distance. Or you do this and you blow up. So they had cables. Have you ever seen that photograph of that? It's like ships in the atoll, and you see this mushroom cloud and coming up out of the water. I have an action.

2:16:35Annie Jacobsen:Oh, it's an incredible photo. We'll put it up on screen. Incredible photo. And O'Donnell took me through how they had to lay cable from the arming facility to the actual bomb. Wow. So how far were they? They were not far away. This is like in those days where, um, you know, they would set the situation up. They had some remote control, right? So they would go out on a ship further out from the atoll, maybe 25 miles away, but, um, and they would do some remote firing. But the actual device had to be attached to its armed system on shore. Which is just kind of an unfathomable detail in today's world.

2:17:26How was he psychologically? How many sailors died?

2:17:31Annie Jacobsen:Well, that was the first atomic test after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I mean, you know, that was a really pivotal moment in history because there was a kind of decision of like, maybe we're gonna sort of not go nuclear. And, you know, there was lots of debate in the international community whether it should be monitored. And the Navy stepped in and was like, you know, 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 have come later because that was an atomic weapon.

2:18:24There was only atomic weaponry in those days. It wouldn't be until the very early 1950s

2:18:31Annie Jacobsen: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, you'll see in the photo, it's not, you know, Castle Bravo or Ivy Mike, the megaton weapons that were going off later. So psychologically, how was O'Donnell? I mean, you know, it took a toll on those individuals, but they also were so conditioned, some might say programmed, to believe... And no, I'm gonna say conditioned, because Russia was such a threat, you know? I mean, totalitarian communism was just a looming threat.

2:19:18Annie Jacobsen: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, you know, 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. Wow. Last question. Yeah. Is America prepared for a biological war? I mean, absolutely not. Absolutely not. And biological war can never happen, you know? It can never happen. This is what I would talk about with nuclear war, where I would say, you know, nuclear war is insane.

2:20:09Annie Jacobsen: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 end game. And biological war is the same situation. It is an end game. 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? You know, 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?

2:20:55Annie Jacobsen:You know, it can never happen. And that can be a specific different lane for all kinds of us, each one of us. Like some people will really take issue with gain of function. We'll say that must be shut down. The current president has shut down gain of function research. You know, others will... I mean, I didn't even mention how many biosafety labs there are right now. Like, I did... We did speak about how during, you know, before 9-11, there were two in America. There was one in Atlanta at the CDC and one at Fort Detrick. Two. Now there are 17 in America. There's 17? 17. There are 110. around the world in countries where there are wars going on.

2:21:47Ukraine.

2:21:48Annie Jacobsen:The BSL-3 labs, which are just one degree below, which, 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, working away without kind of... And no organization tracks this, no government organization. Academics and scientists track this. So you pick your lane once you know about this stuff. Hmm, what do I want to pay attention to and kind of keep eyes on that would be a good... Well, keeping track of what labs are doing what is a great starting place. Wow.

2:22:37Well, my conclusion would be the government's prepared themselves for it, but they haven't done shit to prepare the rest of us. And they probably never will.

2:22:51Annie Jacobsen:or it's a considered such a rarefied problem you know it's the old 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 You know, the influenza pandemic of 1918. That's of the past. And COVID really was a wake-up call that, whoosh, you can just be caught completely off guard. You don't want to be caught unaware. Yeah. Well, Annie, that was a fascinating discussion.

2:23:38Annie Jacobsen:Always a pleasure. Likewise. Thank you.

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