Dark Winter with Raina MacIntyre

My guest is epidemiologist and biosecurity expert, Raina MacIntyre. Dr MacIntyre is Head of the Biosecurity Program at the Kirby Institute, and Professor of Global Biosecurity at UNSW. Today we discuss her latest book DARK WINTER: An insider’s guide to Pandemics and biosecurity. We discuss a series of unnatural outbreaks [lab leaks or deliberate misuse] that have occurred over the past 70 years: Sverdlovsk anthrax release, Rajneeshee bioterror attacks, Amerithrax attacks, and others... Raina breaks down the patterns and features they have in common.  We discuss the highly unusual features of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the 2019 COVID-19 outbreak that raise questions about a possible unnatural origin of these outbreaks. In every case, the outbreak was initially deemed a natural occurrence by scientists, but later [often many years later] were determined to have had an unnatural origin.  Common features in these cases are denial, a cover-up, silence, and often an “information war” led by scientists to control the narrative. The conclusions are inescapable and unsettling: When it comes to investigating an unusual outbreak, we cannot leave the scientists in charge of the investigation. And second, in an era of widely available synthetic biology, accelerated natural selection, and covert DUROC, we face an existential threat from bioweapons of mass destruction. The odds have already shifted dramatically in favor of any outbreak being due to a lab leak or deliberate misuse rather than due to a natural occurrence.