In October 2019, just weeks before the outbreak of COVID-19, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, along with the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, organized “Event 201,” a “high-level pandemic exercise” that mirrored what later followed with COVID-19 pandemic.
In March 2021, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), in conjunction with the Munich Security Conference, held a “tabletop exercise on reducing high-consequence biological threats.”
This “fictional exercise scenario” involved the simulation of “a deadly, global pandemic involving an unusual strain of monkeypox virus that first emerged in the fictional nation of Brinia and spread globally over 18 months.”
According to NTI, this exercise, which was “[d]eveloped in consultation with technical and policy experts,” brought together “19 senior leaders and experts from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe with decades of combined experience in public health, biotechnology industry, international security, and philanthropy.”
The exercise culminated in a report, published November 2021, titled “Strengthening Global Systems to Prevent and Respond to High-Consequence Biological Threats: Results from the 2021 Tabletop Exercise Conducted in Partnership with the Munich Security Conference.”
This report contains key findings from the exercise, as well as “actionable recommendations for the international community.”
The outcome of this “exercise scenario” found the fictional pandemic, “caused by a terrorist attack using a pathogen engineered in a laboratory with inadequate biosafety and biosecurity provisions and weak oversight,” led to “more than three billion cases and 270 million fatalities worldwide.”
The fictional start date of the monkeypox pandemic in this exercise was May 15, 2022. The first European case of monkeypox was identified on May 7, 2022.
