Annie Jacobsen

speaker

83 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Annie Jacobsen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Excerpt · Could biological warfare cause the next pandemic? · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

And if there's one thing I had hoped to bring to the table in my reporting, it is precisely that.

You know, I'm so glad you brought this up because it could be a situation, reading biological war scenario, of, you know, potential doom and gloom.

Because I am writing a dystopian scenario that will hopefully never happen.

But on counterbalance, I believe and have solid reason to believe that progress comes from people.

Weapons of mass destruction, like biological weapons, like nuclear weapons, are man-made problems.

Therefore, I believe they have man-made solutions.

And hopefully that's what all of this is about.

I take the readers through precisely those moments that I learned from my sources in the Defense Department and the intelligence community who have eyes on these BSL-4 labs around the world.

so that in the event that there is an accident, steps can be taken immediately to try and, air quotes, offer to help.

And there are all kinds of intelligence community disciplines, everything from signals intelligence to something called MAISN, measurement and signature intelligence, whereby sensors

covertly placed sensors run by the U.S.

government are essentially sniffing to find clues to help learn about an outbreak in the immediate aftermath.

And what ends up happening, as I show in the book, is that it does all happen really fast.

I mean, in essence, the scenario I report takes the reader from outbreak to anarchy in six days, because if

a pathogen is not contained, the greatest fear that the US Defense Department has time and time again going over these war games is that the general population becomes consumed with fear over the fear of infection.

And because we all went through COVID, I think we know precisely what that means.

Again, timing is everything.

You know, the pathogen that I chose in the scenario, I did so with real intention.

I chose pneumonic plague.

And, you know, people are familiar with bubonic plague from the history books because of the Black Death of the 14th century.

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