Transcript
00:00:00Why did I choose Plague? I chose it for an incredibly sinister reason that is based in science, because I am a nonfiction author.
00:00:08Biological War Scenario is sold in the nonfiction section.
00:00:12The Soviets, and this is what Dr. Hine told me, part of the Soviets' super plague weapon they were working on is they engineered into the Yersinia pestis bacteria,
00:00:29a gene for euphoria. Stay with me here. You get plague, you get flu, you get sick, you go home and you get under the covers.
00:00:42And you do not infect as many people as you would.
00:00:45Lattitude, yep.
00:00:48They infected a gene for euphoria because they wanted people to be, if you have euphoria, you want to go to a disco.
00:00:57And what Hine told me, that that really sort of freaked out the USAMRAD doctors and scientists and said, that is straight up evil, that you would actually think that through.
00:01:09And that's why I chose that, because I wanted it to have an analogy in the real world.
00:01:14So does yours have the euphoria thing in it?
00:01:15Absolutely. It is genetically modified to have euphoria.
00:01:18So the first 24 hours, people are spent euphoric, and they only essentially collapse into the disease when the euphoria wears off.
00:01:27And now they're shedding bacteria.
00:01:31They're infecting people like nobody's business.
00:01:34And they've been at places like discos.
00:01:36Okay, so you've got a bunch of happy people dancing around.
00:01:39How does that transmission chain begin in your book?
00:01:42The transmission chain begins, I'm not going to totally spoiler alert all my plot points, but outbreak in Siberia.
00:01:51You happen to have a group of international hunters who come across a scientist when they get on their planes to go home to five or six of the seven continents.
00:02:06In a great mood.
00:02:08One of them shot a wolf, you know, and there begins the spreading.
00:02:16I also have a scientist that goes to a priest to confess what he's done.
00:02:24And a person there gets infected who is a student at UCLA, gets on a plane, and is immediately in Los Angeles.
00:02:35So the outbreak, spoiler alert here, but you learned this pretty much in the beginning.
00:02:40The outbreak happens in Los Angeles in a homeless camp.
00:02:45Because I learned from all the epidemiologists that I work with that the homeless population is so incredibly dangerous to public health epidemics.
00:02:57Why?
00:02:59After 9-11, the CDC created a nationwide syndromic surveillance system called Biosense.
00:03:09So you have 7,000, more than 7,000 hospitals, urgent care facilities, emergency rooms,
00:03:17feeding information to the CDC in real time about an outbreak.
00:03:23So that an outbreak stops before it becomes an epidemic, before it becomes a pandemic.
00:03:30America's 800,000 homeless people are not part of that system.
00:03:36All of the epidemiologists I talked to spoke of their great fear about transmission occurring in that kind of a situation.
00:03:46And Los Angeles is kind of ground zero for that.
00:03:50We have 75,000 homeless people.
00:03:53We have 4,000 homeless people on Skid Row with no health care, with no facilities.
00:04:02We're way past the time where America could have just nuked the host country.
00:04:08We're at hour 24, 36, absolutely.
00:04:12I mean, you know, containment is possible.
00:04:15You could, if you had, if you had transparency from the host nation, right?
00:04:19If Russia had asked, in my scenario.
00:04:21It has to be done by them, though.
00:04:22It has.
00:04:23There's no time.
00:04:23You can't even get to Russia in the amount of time you need to contain it.
00:04:26Well, you can.
00:04:27We have people in Russia.
00:04:28But you don't have, you're right, the resources to be able to galvanize 100,000 hazmat suit wearing special forces people to go and say, hey, stay in this area and, you know, set up barricades and sentry checkpoints and all that sort of stuff.
00:04:48Although we actually do, like if you could contain something before it balloons and becomes huge, and this is the same in the United States.
00:04:55I take the reader through once the outbreak happens, you learn, you know, we have a force or it's called a CBRN response force here in the United States.
00:05:04That's the WMD, chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear.
00:05:09They all train the same.
00:05:11We have 18,000 individuals that are ready to go at all times.
00:05:16But they wouldn't, that 18,000 people are in America.
00:05:19Yes.
00:05:19So it is on the host nation.
00:05:21Yes.
00:05:22It is on the host nation.
00:05:23And Russia has those same, their troops are called Arkebeze.
00:05:26They have those troops too, and they could deploy them.
00:05:28But if you don't.
00:05:29And they do, and that's what happens in the scenario.
00:05:30Once we see they've deployed those troops, we know, but now it's too late.
00:05:34Right, right, right.
00:05:35Now the cat's out of the bag.
00:05:36Right.
00:05:36So speed, from a containment perspective, from a restriction of how lethal this could be, speed of containment is?
00:05:43Everything.
00:05:44Paramount, most important?
00:05:45Everything, everything.
00:05:46Everything.
00:05:46And it could be stopped.
00:05:48And then you have the same situation in the United States where it could be stopped.
00:05:51But this is where we get into your brilliant analogy, which is that no one trusts the system.
00:05:56And that's where you see in the scenario that I write, everything breaks down.
00:06:00And to have learned as I did that what really makes the defense department extremely uneasy is not necessarily the original outbreak, but the secondary effect of anarchy and insurrection that happens in response.
00:06:19When does devolution happen?
00:06:20When does devolution happen?
00:06:21So in the scenario I write, because we're dealing with plague, which is fast.
00:06:26It's a fast killer.
00:06:27I take the reader from outbreak to anarchy in six days.
00:06:34That is how fast it happens.
00:06:36And on day six, we have devolution.
00:06:38Oh, okay.
00:06:38Okay.
00:06:39Well, in that case, we'll get to that.
00:06:41So homeless encampment, UCLA student goes back, LA's not great, densely populated.
00:06:50He's a pre-med student and he does pro bono work there at Skid Row.
00:06:56Which is literally the worst place for him to be.
00:06:59And he gives, you know, that's a super spreader event.
00:07:02Those homeless camps are super spreader events.
00:07:05And that's what happens.
00:07:06What are the contributing elements or the characteristics of a super spreader event?
00:07:11High density?
00:07:12Yeah.
00:07:13Poor, poor, poor airflow.
00:07:15Right.
00:07:15So you got, you know, tents.
00:07:17Yeah, pretty good airflow if you're in a.
00:07:19Tent.
00:07:20Outdoor environment.
00:07:21If you're under a bridge.
00:07:22Yeah, it's tents.
00:07:23It's inside tents.
00:07:24Right.
00:07:24But more than anything, what you have is a very serious problem.
00:07:28First of all, you know, you've got free clinics.
00:07:30I mean, I spent quite a bit of time down on Skid Row interviewing people about this.
00:07:34And you've got, you know, no public health care.
00:07:38You've got long lines for these free clinics.
00:07:41And you have first responders.
00:07:44You have these brilliant nurses and doctors who work down there.
00:07:46A lot of them pro bono also.
00:07:49Diagnosing people, you're trying to differentiate between fentanyl overdosing, you know, tuberculosis,
00:07:55flu, acute flu, real serious problems that almost every homeless person has, physical health
00:08:01problems, with what looks like a bad cold.
00:08:04And, you know, coughing up blood, another, you know, mistaken for alcoholism.
00:08:11So I take the reader through the science of this so that you can really see the close
00:08:15proximity of alarmism and there's nothing wrong here.
00:08:21Which everybody wants to do.
00:08:22They want to reassure the populace.
00:08:24They want to try and stave off the anarchy and the civilizational citizenry collapse.
00:08:31But also by doing that, you don't galvanize the sort of response that you need to stop it
00:08:36from happening.
00:08:37And when you do galvanize it, what was really the most surprising to me was that once the defense
00:08:45department goes from what's called WARNORD, that's a warning order, to EXORD, which is execution
00:08:51order, right?
00:08:52That's like, get ready to go and go with guys in biohazard suits to try to mitigate damage.
00:09:00It's too late.
00:09:02It's too late.
00:09:03And I was really stunned to learn that at that point, the pivot is not, let's try and
00:09:08protect the population.
00:09:09It's, we need to protect critical infrastructure.
00:09:14What does critical infrastructure consist of?
00:09:16Everything that keeps society running, roads, water systems, of course, nuclear power plant,
00:09:23every single DOD facility.
00:09:25And that's where those, initially the 18,000 C-Burn forces in their suits and their gas masks
00:09:34go.
00:09:35And then the entire defense department gets deployed.
00:09:38And what's really shocking is, again, this is not Annie's imagination.
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