This report was originally published by Daisy Luther at The Organic Prepper
Earlier this summer, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security met in Washington DC with experts who have experience in the prevention of pandemic and roles in government to discuss Clade X, a virus with the potential to kill 900 million people.
Business Insider reports:
The committee to advise the President first met approximately one month after the virus first appeared.
There had been more than 400 cases and 50 deaths so far, mostly split between Frankfurt, Germany, and Caracas, Venezuela.
Patients presented with fever, cough, and confusion. In a disturbing number of cases, encephalitis — swelling in the brain — caused patients to fall into a potentially fatal coma.
Researchers had been able to isolate what appeared to be a new pathogen, a disease-causing agent.
The virus seemed to be a new type of parainfluenza virus from a family of respiratory viruses that normally cause mild illnesses like the cold. Scientists studying the disease couldn’t identify where the virus fit in the parainfluenza family, so they referred to the pathogen as parainfluenza Clade X.
Health authorities said Clade X, which appeared to spread by coughing and to take up to a week before patients started showing severe symptoms, had pandemic potential.
This situation described here is fictional. (source)
The situation above is a simulation by Johns Hopkins University. They wanted to see how policy experts and the government would react in the event of a virus run amok. The players included people with real-world experience in making similar decisions.
- Tom Daschle: former Senate Majority Leader
- Susan Brooks (R-IN): current member of Congress
- Julie Gerberding: former CDC Director
- Jeffrey Smith: former CIA legal counsel
- Tara O’Toole: former Undersecretary at DHS
- Margaret Hamburg: former Commissioner of the FDA
- Jamie Gorelick: former Deputy Attorney General
- Jim Talent (R-MO): former US Representative and Senator
- John Bellinger: former Legal Advisor to the US State Department and the National Security Council
Over the course of the simulation, John Hopkins demonstrated the ease with which a new virus could kill 150 million people within a year. But the creator of the exercise told Business Insider in an interview that he believes that number is low and that the real tally could be closer to 900 million deaths.
What is the Clade X virus?
Luckily, Clade X doesn’t exist. But, according to experts, it “could.” In fact, it was specifically created by Dr. Eric Toner to be as realistic as possible.
The imaginary virus is “moderately contagious and moderately lethal” and …”there are no effective medical countermeasures.” There is no vaccine for it because it was bioengineered and deliberately released by a cult.
The Clade X virus that Toner and colleagues used in the simulation was only moderately contagious and moderately lethal. It spread as easily and was about as deadly as SARS, which infected more than 8,000 between 2002 and 2003, killing about 10% of those infected .
The world was lucky SARS wasn’t worse. That virus wasn’t particularly contagious until people were already very sick. As a result, it spread more in healthcare settings, once patients had landed in clinics and hospitals. That limited the spread of SARS in broader public spaces.
There’s also evidence it mutated to become less virulent. SARS was stopped, but there was “a great deal of luck involved,” according to Toner. (source)
Although the virus in this simulation was manmade, Toner says that the response to this isn’t any necessarily different than what we’d be dealing with in the event of a pathogen that emerged naturally.
Here’s how the simulation went.
The simulation, which took a year to create, went like this:
The model assumes that the first cases of Clade X in the world are the result of deliberate attacks in the cities of Caracas, Venezuela, and Frankfurt, Germany. The number of people infected by the attack in each of these cities is 50 and 60, respectively.
Because victims of a deliberate biological release may be exposed to a larger dose of infectious pathogens than those infected naturally, the proportion of index cases hospitalized is around 80%. In contrast, the proportion of cases hospitalized among naturally acquired infections is 50%.
The case fatality risk (CFR) among hospitalized patients for most of the affected cities is 20%. However, the CFR was inflated to 50% for Caracas to reflect the degradation of the healthcare and public health systems.
Following the 2 initial attacks, 300 of the largest cities in the world were stochastically seeded with infectious cases over time to represent disease spread through international travel. The rate at which new cities were added to the model grows exponentially, much like the growth of the epidemic itself. The number of imported cases ranged from 1 to 7 for each city.
In order to capture greater geographic fidelity, a separate model pipeline was created for the United States, using the same model structure described above. The towns of Bethesda, Maryland, and Berkshire, Massachusetts, were seeded in accordance with the exercise storyline. In addition, 300 of the largest cities and towns in the United States were seeded randomly. As with the global model, the rate at which new cities were added to the model grows exponentially. (source)
After the initial deliberate infection, the disease spread person-to-person, primarily by coughing. Half of the people infected required intensive care hospitalization and 20% of the people infected died. The outbreak was hastened by travel, the military, and a foreign exchange student in the simulation.
The players debated these policies:
- Inadequate global health security;
- Lack of sufficient US capacity for isolation, transportation, and care of highly infectious patients;
- The decisions about whether and how to conduct large-scale screening, monitoring, and quarantine of potentially exposed individuals;
- The complex, often limited, and sometimes unclear, lines of US government authority with regard to public health and medical response resulting from the US federal system of government and the nearly entirely private healthcare system;
- The complicated, and sometimes competing, interests of international relations, US foreign policy, military strategy, and health security; and
- The challenges inherent in medical countermeasure development, manufacture, and dispensing in a crisis.
What Johns Hopkins concluded
Well, basically, as we learned when 3 cases of Ebola effectively shut down a hospital in Texas, we are not ready for a deadly pandemic. Hospitals would collapse under the pressure of such a deadly disease, and effective vaccines simply can’t be created quickly enough to quell the death toll.
20 months after the start of the outbreak, there were 150 million dead around the globe, and 15 to 20 million deaths in the US alone. With no vaccine for the illness yet ready, that death toll would have been expected to climb.
They offered the following recommendations to prevent such a death toll:
- Develop capability to produce new vaccines and drugs for novel pathogens within months not years.
- Pioneer a strong and sustainable global health security system.
- Build a robust, highly capable national public health system that can manage the challenges of pandemic response
- Develop a national plan to effectively harness all US healthcare assets in a catastrophic pandemic.
- Implement an international strategy for addressing research that increases pandemic risks.
- Ensure the national security community
Although the exercise demonstrated how 150 million people could succumb to the illness, the conclusion, according to Toner, is that “a disease like this could kill 900 million people or more than 10% of the world’s population.”
One thing is certain. The medical system is NOT prepared for something like Clade X.
From a prepper’s perspective
With a virulent illness like Clade X, the number one way to prevent infection is social distancing. As I wrote during the Ebola scare, the safest choice is to go into lockdown with your family for as long as the threat looms.
Pandemic preparedness is lacking in most of our preps but as the threat of bioterrorism increases, the need to get prepared for this becomes more urgent. Here’s a brief article on the topic and here’s the best book I’ve seen for dealing with myriad terrifying possibilities.
References:
Implications for National Policy
Improving Policy to Prepare for a Pandemic
Please feel free to share any information from this article in part or in full, giving credit to the author and including a link to The Organic Prepper and the following bio.
Daisy is a coffee-swigging, gun-toting, homeschooling blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, and the pursuit of liberty on her websites, The Organic Prepper and DaisyLuther.com She is the author of 4 books and the co-founder of Preppers University, where she teaches intensive preparedness courses in a live online classroom setting. You can follow her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter,.
Make your own colloidal silver and take a sip or two a day. Never be full blown sick again.
Don’t take too much, or you’ll turn blue. Permanently.
Wondering if that blue guy ever got sick or an infection, though.
You’d have to drink a gallon a day for that to happen. Just sip it.
Dirty money.
Using plastic has one upside. You don’t have to handle cash that has been passed around. I like cash and I’ve discovered that I can put it through the washer and dryer. Coins can be washed and dried separately. Then pay the exact amount.
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Sex is better with one and only one you love. Making love used to be heavily restricted. It is an easy way to become infected. I avoid shaking hands and I resist being mauled by people I hardly know.
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When my children were first born, I introduced myself. “Hi, baby. I’m your …”. Then I started them on math by counting their fingers and toes. As they grew up, I went from teaching them the names and spellings of things like skin and hair to the internal organs, bones, and muscles. My children took advanced education in the medical field on their own. It helps to have some medical training whether or not you work full time in medicine. Take good care of your children. They are your human resource.
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Wouldn’t it be easier to just wash your hands? That’s what I do.
I avoid shaking hands saying it causes arthritis flare ups (a good excuse for middle age or elderly to avoid doing it). Get immune system in good shape, off the junk foods, take zinc, lysine, vit D and other common supplements. 7th Generation germ spray or cloths can be used on currency, or get prepaid plastic anywhere. touching keypads @ checkout counters: take antibacterial wipes in the car and wipe hands and areas in car. stay away from crowds and shop early when stores are empty.
All the antibacterial wipes and soaps are just weeding out the germs that aren’t immune. This will eventually lead to all the germs being immune. Plain soap and water is fine. Lying to avoid touching someone is getting into Howie Mandel territory.
I cannot recall the effective date but the FDA has banned antibacterial soap because it just isn’t needed and is making the resistant bacteria situation worse.
Just wash your hands.
I agree. FFS soap and water work just fine! I avoid touching my eyes, nose, mouth and face when I am away from home and the first thing I do when I get home is to change my clothes and wash my hands with plain soap and hot water. Not complicated!
I’ll pass on being a germaphobe. Anyone that thinks not shaking hands will keep them healthy is a moron.
So they have to create 9 “Clade X” viruses to kill 9/10 of us?
From a paranoid perspective – this could also be viewed as war games for culling the masses. Determining the best course to randomly subject the population for death rather than having any one country/government/person start an actual war. Seems like a “clean” way for a one-world-government to go about population control without fear of direct repercussion from the people. Nobody to specifically blame… It would be ugly, but unfortunately effective.
Nothing paranoid about being realistic. The world’s elite have made no secret of their desire to thin the herd (maybe by over 90%). They call us useless eaters and talk of what a blemish we are on mother earth – Gaia – their goddess.
If that Satanist witch Hillary had been elected, we wouldn’t stand a chance.
The medical establishment does not deserve any trust, big pharma and the center for disease control create sickness with poisonous concoctions. That’s why they are above the law. Call it what it is, a nation of experimental guinea pigs while the government approves and looks the other way. Pure evil lurks in the heart of monied control freaks.
As long as its genetecly engineered to only take out certain groups im fine with it. Make it Ksacs or sickle enemia viable. We need a great culling. Im feeling mean today!
Nope. You are missing the bigger picture ie Transportation, Inventory, and Distribution. Then missing the Security effects under state and national pandemic guidelines.
First, it takes 2-3 YEARS in a best case scenario to make a vaccine IF they can grow it (as it may be such a lethal brew that it kills the medium), and then IF they can find any resistance is gained by taking the vaccine, and IF the pathogen doesn’t mutate (which it almost ALWAYS does) ie by the time a vaccine is created, it has generally mutated into something worse even having different symptoms and different vectors of transmission like the manner by which it spreads. There is no static flu vaccine, but a new one is created every year and with a low efficacy.
Second, yes…it might kill a billion or more, but what kills the MOST is panic, mayhem, disruptions in food, medicine, water, security, etc.
In that 2-3 year window and due to Just-in-Time manufacturing and inventory and distribution practices in America (which were created by an American but became the Japanese paradigm), people wouldn’t actually be manufacturing, inventorying, or distributing anything due to SOCIAL DISTANCING.
Everyone would stay at home in the urban areas and be starving, dehydrated, without power, the roads blocked, no train traffic, no marine transit, no air travel, etc.
Most would die through such social distancing. They could easily die in 12-24 days based upon a lack of chlorine to the cities’ water supply, and die from other pathogens in impure water. Presuming the water is still flowing, as it is mostly not gravity fed and without fuel to produce electricity by various means, there is no water pressure. That means death in 72 hours under ideal conditions but certain death after a comatose state after 144 hours.
So 900 millions is a low figure of mortality by contagion versus the high mortality by no food, water, medicine, and no security (no rule of law).
Look up “state pandemic preparedness guidelines” and “congressional reports” and “state border closures”. The governors would close all state borders to limit the spread of contagion and thus bugging out would be extremely limited UNTIL the horde overruns and remaining law enforcement officials and most likely militay units.
no way, you ARE WRONG!! .
Hollywood told me through all their movies and TV programs concerning pandemics that they just have to use everything at the US Govt disposal and all of their super secret scientists and hidden labs, to find patient zero and then they make a vaccine between commercials..They after they give the vaccine to just one or two people, all they have to do is cough in the faces of the unvaccinated and they will all be saved.
True story, uh huh…Holyweird wouldn’t lie to us, and true believers would never cite Holyweird productions as the source to their “scientific proof” its true, would they?(SARC OFF)
This is all just fear porn.
I’ve already been culled by the government……taxed to death!
Congratulations… you’re free!
I have been expecting a pandemic for years. Either natural or man-made, it doesn’t matter.
My plan? Bleach (or pool shock), plastic wrap, and duct tape along with enough food on hand for six months. Quarantine, especially self quarantine would suck, but anyone that thinks the government will be able to protect you is a fool playing with fire who doesn’t think they can set themselves on fire.
Liquid bleach does not maintain its strength for too long. Better to have the dry crystals such as pool shock.