Original subtitles

Deadly diseases that strike without warning and spread across the planet.

The Black Death killed millions upon millions of people.

Almost like a zombie death.

Lethal biological weapons of mass destruction.

Anthrax, botulism, tularemia, I call them the chess pieces of doom, and

mysterious viruses.

that may rival the worst plagues in history.

Hopefully, we'll conquer whatever happens together.

Throughout human history, deadly pandemics have arisen, devastating local

populations before spreading across the entire world, crippling economies,

destroying societies, and leaving mass death in their wake.

Are these global pandemics simply acts of God?

caused by natural forces beyond our control?

Or does mankind bear much of the blame, as well as hold the key to the ultimate

cure?

Perhaps the truth can be found in America's book of secrets.

March 11th, 2020.

The World Health Organization announces that the outbreak of COVID -19, also

known as the novel coronavirus, has become a global pandemic.

As the number of cases and deaths caused by the lethal virus surge higher and

higher, day after day, countries around the world struggle to provide

care for the unprecedented wave of patients that need treatment.

The COVID -19 pandemic is honestly the biggest public health emergency of our

lifetime. And it has been sobering to see how quickly a disease like that can

spread around the world.

When I go to work and I see a line outside of the emergency department,

there's not enough ICU nurses, respiratory therapists, even medication,

to help the patients who are suffering from novel coronavirus.

The hospitals become overwhelmed, and so patients who needed the care for COVID

may not get the best care. And in addition, all the other patients who

may not be cared for appropriately.

When a pandemic starts, so many people are going to be infected.

And unfortunately, many people will suffer and die.

So being on the front line, I realized what a pandemic can do to

so many people, my colleagues and myself.

By October of 2020, more than one million people had died from COVID -19

worldwide, making it the worst pandemic in more than a century.

The devastation caused by this disease is a sobering reminder of the dire

threat. posed by viruses.

A virus is an intracellular parasite that enters the host and

basically hijacks the host cell's machinery to create more viral proteins

and more viral particles and spreads itself that way.

They take over our cells, they use our own bodies to reproduce, and then...

They'll cause destruction in many of the organs in our body.

With COVID -19, we're dealing with something completely new.

And so I think there's a lot of lessons learned we have here.

I think we learned how important it is to have rapid diagnostics.

I wrote an article not too long ago about the military battlefield lessons.

We talk about the war against COVID.

You need to have intelligence preparation in the battlefield. You need

what's the battle space.

Entire U .S. is a battle space. You need to deny the enemy, conceal and cover.

How do you do that? You do that with diagnostics.

As the COVID -19 virus raged across the globe and nations joined in an

unprecedented effort to contain it, the answer to one daunting question proved

both mysterious and elusive.

Just exactly where did this virus come from?

The best science that we have says that the virus that causes COVID -19 probably

started in animals somewhere in China.

Might have been a bat, might have been some other type of animal.

It was very likely, in my opinion, that this virus came probably from a bat,

because we know there are multiple coronaviruses that circulate in bats.

And then from there, it went to humans and person -to -person spread and then

amplified.

I think actually what would help to solve this mystery is really to have an

international unbiased team that actually goes to try to trace back the

of the virus back to that first patient zero.

And that's the best way to solve this mystery. But we'll have to see whether

that'll ever happen.

Most human diseases that we're worried about actually start in animals.

Some deadly viruses that infect humans that have animal origins are Ebola,

smallpox, influenza, the virus that causes COVID -19, rabies,

Nipah virus, which causes encephalitis in some parts of the world, and

the list goes on and on.

Despite the opinions of some that COVID -19 spread from animals to humans,

numerous experts, including Robert Redfield, the former head of the CDC,

begun to speculate that it may have escaped from an experimental lab in

China.

If that is the case, then just how could such a disastrous event occur?

There are four ways a pathogen could escape, quote, unquote, escape a lab.

The first would be through some type of aerosol release through one of the vents

into the atmosphere.

The second is if an animal were infected and then somehow got out of the lab.

A third way would be if someone were intentionally to try to steal something

take it out of the lab.

And then the fourth is that someone who's working in the laboratory gets

inadvertently infected and then they go out into the community not realizing

they're potentially contagious, they get ill, they can spread it.

Washington, D .C.

October 2nd, 2020.

President Donald J. Trump tests positive for COVID -19, joining a growing list

of world leaders infected by the potentially deadly virus.

Although President Trump recovers within 10 days, his exposure demonstrates the

grave risk that disease has posed to heads of state.

And in fact, national security experts.

are increasingly concerned about the threat of pandemics being used as

weapons. A bioweapon is an infectious disease agent like a bacteria or a virus

that somebody chooses to use for what I call nefarious purposes.

So it's something that they might grow and then try to expose people to either

to cause fear and panic or to get people sick.

There are certain properties that some pathogens have that lend themselves more

favorably to serving as a weapon. So something that's available, something

could be grown up in large quantities, something stable in the environment such

that it can be released over a large population, whether it's a battlefield

city environment.

The CDC calls them the Category A threat agents.

Things like anthrax.

botulism, plague, tularemia, smallpox, and viral hemorrhagic fevers. I

call them the chess pieces of doom. The case fatality rates for these different

category A agents range from tularemia with about 30 % death rate up to

something like Ebola, which is 90 % fatal without countermeasures.

Smallpox is a really interesting bioweapon because smallpox has been

It doesn't occur naturally anymore, but we also have a population of people who

really have never been vaccinated against it, and that makes us really

vulnerable. So smallpox is probably my number one worry, and then anthrax is my

number two because there has been a previous bioterrorism event in the U .S.

involving anthrax.

In 2001, there was a bioterrorism attack on U .S. soil.

spread in letters that were sent to the U .S. Post Office, and they got a lot of

people sick.

But just how likely is the prospect of a devastating virus being used as a

bioweapon?

There are those who claim that not only is it possible, but that it already

happened centuries ago, during the deadliest pandemic in recorded history.

May 26, 2021.

The Democratic Republic of Congo.

Health officials report that 11 victims have died from the bubonic plague.

The government moves quickly to contain the outbreak, providing the sick with

powerful antibiotics.

A treatment that didn't exist 700 years ago, when the disease touched off the

worst pandemic in history.

The Black Death is really the pandemic that eclipses all others.

I mean, it killed millions upon millions of people in medieval Europe beginning

in the 14th century.

The Black Death lasted from about 1347 to

1349, 1350.

Roughly a third of the European population died.

Italy was devastated.

England was.

France was.

The stories behind it just, they send chills up my spine. It almost sounds

an episode of zombie death.

Big, orange, like balls on their hands and arms.

The fingers were green.

We know now that this was something called Yersinia pestis.

This is a bacteria.

So it's easy for me to say now, it's Yersinia pestis.

They didn't know that back then.

Despite not understanding the exact mechanism by which the disease spread,

people in the Middle Ages sensed that the Black Death could afflict anyone who

came into contact with it.

This knowledge gave rise to one of the earliest known examples of personal

protective equipment, or PPE.

The plague doctor outfit was essentially a medieval hazmat suit. It had a

kind of very hard covering so that the doctor wouldn't be sprayed with bodily

fluids. And then there was a beak, which was filled with flowers or

herbs or anything that smelled nice to keep the stench of death away from the

doctor, with the idea being that...

bad smells or miasma is really what was causing people to get sick.

It was the best hypothesis they had.

The Black Death, now known as the Bubonic Plague, has been studied by

and scientists for centuries in order to better understand its destructive

power.

And it's a power that was actually unleashed on a medieval battlefield.

becoming one of the earliest known forms of biological warfare.

Khafa, Crimea, 1346.

For three years, this port city on the Black Sea, part of the Republic of

was under siege from Mongolian Tartar invaders.

This is an old walled city, And inside the city were Genoese.

And Tatar invaders came and laid siege to the city.

They surrounded the city. But then there was an outbreak, a plague amongst the

Tatar ranks.

The Mongol population was starting to get very sick.

And whether this is a form of biochemical warfare, psychological

both, what they ended up doing was...

catapulting the corpses of their people over the walls of Caffa and landing on

the Genoese people repeatedly.

And the Genoese defenders eventually started having their own outbreaks of

plague within the city.

The Black Death was actually used as kind of an early bioweapon. That would

actually incredibly efficient because the town under siege is a place where

people packed very closely together.

So that disease could spread from dead bodies and spread to the defenders.

The use of the black death in warfare underscores the deadly potential of a

pandemic being utilized as a bioweapon.

And today in the United States, it is a scenario that some believe the federal

government must be ready for.

Now more than ever.

If we had a very, very severe pandemic, one that was extremely deadly, much more

so than we'll be faced with COVID -19.

The continuity of government would be one of the biggest questions we'd have

face. The continuity of government apparatus is gigantic. We don't see it,

it's made up of the airplanes and the bunkers and the procedures for moving

successors to the presidency and the communication systems that nets it all

together.

It's a multi -billion dollar a year operation, but that operation has really

been created to deal with two very distinct scenarios.

Nuclear war or a terrorist attack on Washington. That's it.

And so when coronavirus came along, I think that the people behind continuity

government didn't quite know what to do.

whole model had to basically be thrown away.

If members of Congress got sick, if the president or the vice president got

sick, if the successors to the presidency under the Constitution were

unavailable, what exactly were the rules?

It will be very interesting as we move forward in the world of emergency

preparedness and continuity of government, whether they deal with a

a very different way.

That's the challenge of the future.

What would happen if a pandemic were to strike down a country's leader?

Could it change the course of history?

Some historians argue that it has already happened.

It helped to sow the seeds for the greatest war the world has ever known.

Breivik Mission, Alaska.

1997.

Pathologist Dr. Johan Hulten excavates an indigenous village graveyard,

searching for something that has eluded scientists for decades.

The cause of the 1918 influenza pandemic, also known as the

Spanish flu.

Johan Hulten had heard about...

a town about 80 miles outside of Nome in Alaska called Brevik Mission.

And it had had a population of about 80, of which almost all of them had been

killed from the 1918 flu.

So he got the approval to disinter some of the bodies in the hopes

that the permafrost had preserved the flu virus and that they could research

And he found the corpse.

of a woman who had been morbidly obese.

But it was, in fact, not the permafrost that preserved the virus, but

her fat storage.

They removed some of that lung tissue, and from that they were able to then

that to the CDC where we were able to understand it better, sequence the

that is, understand the genetic code of that virus.

After successfully sequencing the virus that caused the Spanish flu, scientists

were finally able to unlock the secrets of the most severe pandemic of the 20th

century.

So the virus was able to reproduce itself very quickly and make the host

very quickly as well, and also very readily pass between people.

But there was no one sort of magic bullet, I guess, if you will, that made

incredibly powerful. In fact, it was more like a perfect storm of all these

different features when put together, created this extremely virulent virus.

It was referred to in 1918 as purple death.

So that was a terrible virus. We were able to recover it, understand it.

And then from that, we're able to make diagnostics, treatments and vaccines

can help prevent that from happening again.

However, while thankfully medical science has developed the technology to

protect us from the Spanish flu today, when it first struck in 1918, it quickly

spread across the globe, leaving millions dead in its wake.

The 1918 virus was much more dangerous, much more virulent than COVID -19.

People could die in as little as 12 hours after the first symptoms.

The people who were dying were young.

The peak age for death was in the 20s.

Children were dying in enormous numbers.

So 95 % or so of the excess mortality was people younger than 65.

Exactly the opposite of today.

The 1918 virus killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people.

If you adjust for population, that would be the equivalent of 225 to 450 million

people today.

In 1918, the U .S., of course, was at war.

And the focus of the government was entirely on the war and nothing else.

The government was quite willing, to put it bluntly, to lie and to put the best

face on everything.

Woodrow Wilson, the president, never even made any public statement of any

about the pandemic.

Woodrow Wilson may not have taken the pandemic seriously, but he was not

to its effects.

Wilson contracted the influenza virus during the Paris Peace Conference at the

end of World War I.

Woodrow Wilson had put together what were known as 14 points.

toward the end of World War I, where the world leaders were meeting in Paris.

And his 14 points were essentially how we can work with Germany so something

like this never happens again. And it was very progressive, especially for its

day, and he really stood by it.

Now, Woodrow Wilson also traveled to Paris on the same ship that had

shipped many, many sick soldiers overseas.

So while he was in Paris, Wilson became very sick.

Everybody around him remarked on how his mind was affected, how he

couldn't function, he couldn't process information.

He was physically weak.

And he insisted on returning to the negotiations while he was still set.

During the peace talks, President Wilson had argued that America and its allies

should not punish Germany by imposing a crippling war settlement.

But due to his weakened condition, Wilson was unable to fight for less

punishment than the one ultimately brought against the nation of Germany.

And the course of history was irrevocably altered.

Clemenceau, the French prime minister, hated Germany.

Germany was blamed for the war, had reparations, had territory stripped from

The peace treaty was so bad that almost every historian says that the treaty was

a significant force in the rise of the Nazis and leading to World

War II.

You could definitely make an argument that it then led to a person like Adolf

Hitler, charismatic,

nationalist,

dramatic, all the things that people who are

suffering, who are poor, who are broke, who are starving, can look to someone

like that and see a potential leader.

If the Spanish flu of 1918 can teach mankind anything, it's to always be

prepared.

But how do we get ready?

Some say that to battle future pandemics, we would need to have an

monitoring the world for emerging diseases.

They would race to the site of an outbreak, delivering vital on -the

information to scientists that could fast -track treatments and vaccines.

Well, it turns out...

Such teams do exist, and they're known as the disease detectives.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 21, 1976.

More than 2 ,000 U .S. military veterans gather at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel

for an annual three -day convention of the American Legion.

In the days following the event, 182 of the Legionnaires fall ill with a new

unidentified form of pneumonia.

As doctors struggle to make sense of the mysterious illness, 29 people develop

severe symptoms and perish.

It was an unexplained pneumonia.

We couldn't figure out what it was. None of the normal things that cause

pneumonia turned out to be the cause.

To solve the mystery, the Centers for Disease Control called upon America's

first line of defense against emerging pandemics, the Epidemic Intelligence

Service, or EIS.

The Epidemic Intelligence Service was established in 1951, and the reason why

came to be is that there were concerns about biological threats to the people

the United States.

And so the program was put together so we'd have a workforce.

ready to deploy to investigate any possible biological warfare or threats

against the United States.

Essentially, they are kind of like FBI agents, only instead of going after

criminals and terrorists, they go after disease.

So when an outbreak, especially a sort of outbreak of unknown origin, pops up

the U .S. or sometimes around the world, the CDC will send in epidemiologists

from the service to figure out what's going on. And the CDC's disease

are the best in the world at this.

The Legionnaire outbreak in 1976 sparked nationwide fear about the unknown

disease that had claimed the lives of 29 victims.

So the disease detectives raced to solve the mystery.

They scoured the hotel where the Legionnaires had held their convention,

discovered a mysterious bacterium in the hotel's air conditioning system, and

took samples of it to be analyzed at the Centers for Disease Control.

And so they sent those specimens to CDC, and they were able to characterize an

unusual bacillus.

And they found this thing that's now called Legionella, or Legionnaire's

disease. And so that's something that's in water.

It's very different than other bacterial causes.

You can find it in cooling towers that are on top of buildings.

You can find it in whirlpool spas.

sometimes the swimming pools and other sources of water.

And when people walk past it, they breathe in those droplets, and then they

the bacteria deep in their lungs, and then they get a bad pneumonia, and it

be fake.

Our disease detectives are looking at how can they intervene to ensure upon

safety of the public.

And then after they've investigated and they've collected information and they

think that they might know an intervention, the next step is obviously

communicate that.

The rapid discovery of Legionella bacterium brought the potential outbreak

halt.

Thanks to the information provided by the EIS disease detectives, air

conditioning units and water systems across the country were retrofitted to

minimize the risk.

The program has evolved quite a bit since 1951 when it was originally just

physicians and all males.

So now we include not just physicians but nurses.

veterinarians, PhD -level scientists.

It's a real diverse skill set of people that are prepared to deploy and respond

to emerging threats.

EIF leaders have not only expanded their membership to include experts in

different fields of research and technology, they've also expanded to

operate all around the world.

However... They must accept potentially deadly risks to their own health in the

process.

There was an outbreak I participated in in Uganda where I went in a cave that

was full of thousands and thousands of bats that might be infected with Marburg

virus, which is a deadly virus related to Ebola.

And I really geared up when I went in there.

Not only was I wearing...

battery -operated respirator to help me breathe pure air. I had to wear a helmet

because I might hit my head on the rocks in the cave.

And I actually had to wear snake chaps because there were snakes in that cave,

including spitting cobras, that you wanted to protect yourself against.

And that's what has made it so particularly dangerous.

Disease detectives myself have been involved in SARS in 2003, West Nile

Ebola in 2014 -15, Zika, and now most recently the emergence of COVID

-19. They're the smart people we put out into the field in order to figure

things out as quickly as possible.

For our disease detectives, collecting the most valid and reliable evidence is

their top priority.

Not collecting data for the sake of publication or fame.

They're collecting this information.

so that there can be public health action taken.

They're ready on a moment's notice to deploy to any new or emerging public

health threat.

What happens if the disease detectives are too late and a major epidemic is

already spreading?

Do epidemiologists have the means to predict where a virus might go and

it before it spirals out of control?

It's entirely possible.

And one of the most promising tools just might turn out to be a video game.

September 13th, 2005.

Irvine, California.

Video game developer Blizzard Entertainment introduces a surprise

popular online role -playing game, World of Warcraft.

A virtual virus.

with the potential to infect characters within the game's fantasy universe.

They call the virus Corrupted Blood.

The Corrupted Blood experience in World of Warcraft was essentially a new patch

for the game.

Corrupted Blood was intended to be sort of an inconvenience to these extremely

powerful players as they battled a demon in this particular setting within the

game.

And it was intended to slow these very powerful players down and make it more

challenging to battle the demon.

However, the corrupted blood feature did not stay contained within that special

battleground for very strong players.

In fact, it would spread unintentionally because players infected with the

corrupted blood would leave the battleground and then expose themselves

players that were less powerful. And those players were extremely susceptible

the corrupted blood and then would die.

This corrupted blood episode was essentially a digital pandemic, and it

the players by surprise.

At the time, the more than 5 million World of Warcraft players around the

were rocked by the corrupted blood virus raging through the game as it began

killing off their characters.

But curiously...

Scientists noted that there were eerie similarities between this digital

pandemic and the real outbreak.

When you were infected with this virus, you had to stay away from the other

players. You had to socially distance or else the other player will get

infected.

And there are many different types of players. Some have a lot of points.

Some didn't have a lot of points.

And when you had the virus, your life force will deplete.

So, of course, the individuals that don't have enough coins were the first

pass away, while individuals who collected more coins or coins, they

do better.

And no matter what happened in this game, it seemed like the virus kept on

spreading.

In fact, animals could even get infected in the game.

The corrupted blood pandemic lasted for nearly a month.

before the World of Warcraft designers retooled the virus to stop its spread.

A virtual vaccine, if you will.

But that was not the end of the story.

Because in September of 2007, scientists from Tufts University published a

research paper which suggested that virtual games like World of Warcraft

untapped resource in the study of pandemics.

The unique thing about the World of Warcraft simulation is that it was a

potential new type of opportunity to understand and maybe even predict the

different ways that human behavior might influence the spread of a pandemic.

So, for example, during the outbreak, the developers imposed a quarantine to

to get players to stay within those particular areas to help slow the spread

the corrupted blood feature, but they ignored it.

I think the take -home message is that What once was just a video game or

entertainment turned out to be something that maybe can be studied.

And that was interesting. It wasn't just the game itself, but how the players

reacted to the virus.

How people thought during a pandemic.

What did they do?

In the years since the corrupted blood incident, the use of computer

to help fight real pandemics.

has evolved these sophisticated digital tools are now referred to as

mathematical models the model is really just trying to

predict the future using specific assumptions about where the disease

might be going in terms of the outbreak so you take what's known as best you can

and look at various scenarios and numbers, and you throw that into some

a formula, and it can give you some sense of where the outbreak is going.

Mathematical models can be used to help predict things like how fast a virus

will spread, how many individuals will be affected.

How efficacious these different sorts of methods of slowing the spread might be,

whether it's a quarantine or just limiting certain types of services.

How much hospital capacity will be needed in these different scenarios.

Those are all things that models can help public health officials gauge.

At their best, mathematical models can only offer theories as to what might

happen as a pandemic spreads across the world.

But could a viral threat emerge for which no data exists at all?

How do we prepare for a virus that's not of this Earth?

July 24th, 1969.

900 miles southwest of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

Four days after achieving their historic moon landing.

the Apollo 11 astronauts splash down inside their space capsule and are

recovered by the U .S. Navy.

But instead of being allowed to immediately reunite with their

families to celebrate,

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins are placed in a strict two

-week quarantine.

The reason?

NASA's fears that the men might possibly have contracted a lunar virus.

and brought it back to Earth.

These were the first time astronauts were actually going to another planetary

body, staying there, and then coming back.

It's absolutely feasible that a biological contaminant of some kind

back with astronauts.

They quarantined the astronauts from that first mission, and they also

back moon rocks and tried grinding them up, extracting them, feeding them to

every type of life that they could think of to see if there were any ill

effects.

In the end, concerns that the Apollo 11 astronauts brought back any kind of

lunar infection thankfully turned out to be a false alarm.

But why would NASA worry that bacteria and viruses might exist in the freezing

vacuum of space in the first place?

The answer lies in the controversial theory of panspermia, which suggests

microbial life, including potential viruses, can be found throughout the

including on moons, asteroids, comets, and alien planets.

Panspermia is essentially derived from Greek roots, pans meaning everywhere,

spermata meaning seed.

So panspermia essentially means seeds of life everywhere.

The concept is that life seeds are distributed widely across the entire

universe.

And whenever conditions are correct, are appropriate, on a planet safe like the

Earth, then life is deposited and life gets started.

According to the theory of panspermia, space microbes trapped in meteors and

comets regularly rain down on Earth.

We have some hundred tons of cometary debris.

coming into the Earth's atmosphere all the time.

So I think there had to be a continuing influx of bacteria and

also viruses and major epidemics throughout history have started suddenly

and disappeared equally suddenly.

And I think the most reasonable explanation is that bacteria, viruses,

and maybe even other organisms could have been introduced from outside and

caused these huge pandemics of disease.

The idea that pandemics could come to Earth from space is a fascinating and

chilling theory.

However, the much more sobering reality

is that the grave threat of deadly global infections is alive and well.

A fact driven home by COVID -19.

Summer 2020.

Every nation had to face an indisputable fact.

The virus was everywhere.

And the death toll was mounting.

Doctors, scientists, and political leaders focused on one critical goal,

developing a vaccine to combat COVID -19.

There are multiple challenges to developing vaccines.

The most basic is identifying the appropriate antigen or protein to use

actually will be protective.

And if you think about it, it took us 50 years to get an Ebola vaccine.

We still don't have a vaccine for HIV.

So this can take a long time.

But we were very fortunate now that we identified the right virus.

We knew it was part of the coronavirus family. It was new, hence the word

But we knew what we wanted to fight against, which was the spike protein.

Once we knew that, the science kicked in.

On December 11, 2020.

The world breathed a collective sigh of relief when the U .S. Food and Drug

Administration approved the first coronavirus vaccine.

This breakthrough was quickly followed by additional approved vaccines, and

for the future began to emerge as hundreds of millions were immunized

globe.

Actually, when you have such a concentrated effort and funding,

It's amazing to watch how quickly we've developed new vaccines for this brand

new disease.

That's really incredible, having that will and the money to do it and the

scientific basis.

If I had one wish from this pandemic, it would be that everyone, including

myself, we learn from our mistakes.

And of course, we always need to work together and not be divided.

Because if we don't communicate, we'll never get the input of all the

individuals, whether it be the doctor who travels to Alaska, whether it be the

epidemiologist who plays a video game.

Everyone's opinion counts.

So hopefully we'll continue to communicate and we'll be in this and

whatever happens together.

If recent events have taught us anything, It's that the threat of deadly

pandemics may never be eliminated.

So, here are the questions that remain.

How will the next one arrive?

Is it possible that we can prevent it before it happens?

And if not, will we be ready to contain it?

Some of these answers will only come with time, while the others could remain

hidden in America's book of secrets.