The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in partnership with WHO and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, conducted Catastrophic Contagion, a pandemic tabletop exercise at the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Brussels, Belgium, on October 23, 2022.
The extraordinary group of participants consisted of 10 current and former Health Ministers and senior public health officials from Senegal, Rwanda, Nigeria, Angola, Liberia, Singapore, India, Germany, as well as Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The exercise simulated a series of WHO emergency health advisory board meetings addressing a fictional pandemic set in the near future. Participants grappled with how to respond to an epidemic located in one part of the world that then spread rapidly, becoming a pandemic with a higher fatality rate than COVID-19 and disproportionately affecting children and young people.
Participants were challenged to make urgent policy decisions with limited information in the face of uncertainty. Each problem and choice had serious health, economic, and social ramifications.
Lessons from the exercise
Countries should establish a global network of professional public health leaders who can work together to improve epidemic preparedness and response and strive for consensus on scientific issues in advance of the next major outbreak.
These are not purely public health and scientific decisions; they will be made by leaders in the context of political, economic, and social realities that can be anticipated and considered in advance. Through routine simulations and operational exercises, we can strategically prepare for such challenges ahead of time.
Countries should prioritize efforts to increase trust in government and public health; improve public health communication efforts; increase the resiliency of populations to misleading information; and reduce the spread of harmful misinformation.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security partnered with the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to conduct “Catastrophic Contagion,” an exercise to simulate a global pandemic that is deadlier than the coronovirus and especially dangerous for children.
Bill Gates was in attendance.
The group conducted Catastrophic Contagion in Brussels, Belgium on October 23, 2022.
During the simulation, the World Health Organization’s health advisory board addressed a fictional “Severe Epidemic Enterovirus Respiratory Syndrome” pandemic that originates in Brazil and disseminates across the globe.
The exercise simulated a series of WHO emergency health advisory board meetings addressing a fictional pandemic set in the near future.
According to RXList, enteroviruses, including hepatitis A and polio, are comprised of RNA, enter the body through the gastrointestinal tract and attack the nervous system.
The pandemic simulation also included pre-recorded news broadcasts and live briefings from health officials. This is similar to earlier simulations.
A pundit named Jeanne Meserve of GNN, a fictional news outlet, is seen in footage from the pandemic simulation announcing the high death toll, particularly among children, from the pandemic that would have been prevented if countries adopted pandemic operational drills and adhered to the WHO’s pandemic guidances.
“As of today, there have been an estimated 1 billion cases worldwide with more than 20 million deaths, including nearly 15 million children. Countless millions are alive, but left with paralysis or brain damage,” Meserve notes.
“The most successful countries are those which invested in preparedness and trained for this moment years in advance,” she continues. “This included having full-time pandemic preparedness and response teams which conducted detailed operational planning and routinely tested those plans through exercises and drills. If more countries had participated and heeded the guidance the toll might have been much less.”
Bill Gates and senior public health officials from Angola, Germany, India, Liberia, Nigeria and Rwanda also moderated discussions in the simulation.
On October 18, 2019, just months before the Covid-19 outbreak, the same world elites that conducted “Severe Epidemic Enterovirus Respiratory Syndrome 2025” held a similar exercise dubbed “Event 201.” During the high-level pandemic exercise, they simulated a global coronavirus pandemic that transmitted from bats to pigs to humans, a blueprint for what subsequently transpired with the coronavirus outbreak.
Event 201, conducted just months before the coronavirus started making global headlines, was hosted by the John Hopkins Center for Health Security, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The simulation demonstrated a coordinated global response to the coronavirus pandemic.
1 comment:
Brazil would be a good place to release something as they are in kayos at the moment and being disorganized would assist the spread. Also if it affects younger people, it would most likely be something older people were vaccinated for in the past. (smallpox???)
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