Dr. Philp McMillan, John McMillan
In April 2024, a team of biodefense experts gathered in Washington, D.C. to imagine the unthinkable. Their resulting document, the National Blueprint for Biodefense, contains a detailed tabletop exercise that reads like a nightmare. The scenario outlined should concern everyone, based on what it predicts could happen, and what it reveals about current medical preparedness.
The exercise envisions that on July 4, 2025, bioterrorists deploy a genetically modified Nipah virus across multiple American cities. Within 24 hours, 280,000 Americans are dead. Another 400,000 are infected, plus massive livestock casualties. Congress members fall ill and die. Other nations report similar attacks.
This fictional scenario gained unexpected attention when Dr. David Martin, a controversial figure often dismissed by mainstream media, recently drew attention to this document. While many view Dr. Martin skeptically, the blueprint he highlighted is undeniably real. More troubling still, Dr. Philip McMillan, a respected clinician and researcher, analyzed the scenario and found it disturbingly plausible. “Whether or not there was any correlation, we don’t know,” McMillan noted.
Just as Event 201 simulated a coronavirus pandemic two months before COVID-19 emerged, this new exercise features a pathogen that could theoretically be engineered using existing technology. The parallel may be coincidental, but it deserves scrutiny.
Echoes of Event 201
Event 201 involved an October 2019 pandemic simulation, hosted by Johns Hopkins in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and envisioned a zoonotic coronavirus causing global disruption. Two months later, COVID-19 emerged. The exercise predicted Brazil as ground zero; reality chose China. But the core elements (a novel respiratory virus, rapid global spread, economic collapse) proved eerily accurate.
Understanding Nipah virus helps explain why biodefense planners chose it for their scenario. It represents a different class of threat entirely. First identified in Malaysia in 1998, this zoonotic pathogen originated in fruit bats before spreading to pigs and humans. Its mortality rate ranges from 40 to 75 percent: far deadlier than COVID-19. The virus attacks multiple organ systems simultaneously: lungs suffer respiratory distress, blood vessels experience inflammation and clotting, and the brain develops encephalitis. Victims face rapid multi-organ failure with limited treatment options.
Thankfully, Nipah has remained a localized threat because it spreads poorly between humans. Direct contact with infected bodily fluids poses the primary risk. Person-to-person transmission, while possible through respiratory droplets, remains inefficient. Past outbreaks killed dozens, not millions, burning out when victims died faster than the virus could spread. This natural limitation has contained past outbreaks to villages and small communities.
The Genetic Modification Factor
But the biodefense scenario describes something far more sinister: a Nipah virus that has been genetically modified to spread efficiently from animal to human and person to person, while retaining its terrifying fatality rate.
The mechanism for such modification already exists. SARS-CoV-2 taught the world about furin cleavage sites, molecular features that act like keys, allowing viruses to unlock and enter human cells more easily. This tiny genetic addition transformed COVID-19 from a localized threat into a global pandemic. Without it, the virus would have struggled to spread beyond its initial outbreak zone.
Adding a furin cleavage site to Nipah would create precisely the hyper-transmissible agent described in the government’s scenario. The virus would gain the ability to spread through the air more efficiently, infect multiple organ systems faster, and overwhelm immune responses before the body could mount a defense.
Dr. McMillan explains the implications: “If one put a furin cleavage site on that virus, would it help the infectivity? Absolutely.” The same modification that transformed COVID-19 could theoretically turn Nipah from a village-level threat into a nation-killer.
The Hidden Danger: Missing Autopsy Data
While this hypothetical threat captures headlines, Dr. McMillan identifies a more immediate danger hiding in plain sight. “For some reason, nobody wants to do autopsies,” he observes, referring to the near-total absence of systematic post-mortem examinations in vaccinated individuals who die from COVID-related complications.
“We know what happened when COVID caused death early in the pandemic. We have thousands of autopsies,” McMillan states. Yet for vaccinated individuals who later die with severe COVID, basic questions remain unanswered. Do they die through the same mechanisms as early pandemic victims? Have new patterns emerged?
Without this data, physicians lack baselines for comparison. A new pathogen presenting with brain inflammation, vascular damage, and respiratory failure (symptoms common to both COVID complications and Nipah infection) could go unrecognized until too late. The overlapping symptom profiles would create diagnostic chaos, potentially masking a biological attack or natural outbreak within the noise of ongoing COVID cases.
The scenario gains additional weight from an uncomfortable historical footnote. The furin cleavage site that made SARS-CoV-2 so infectious existed in patent databases before the pandemic, filed by entities that later profited from vaccine development. “Coincidence? Perhaps,” McMillan writes. “But biology doesn’t do politics — it just follows the code it’s given.”
Converging Vulnerabilities
Three facts converge to create concern: the government has detailed a specific scenario involving an engineered pathogen; the technology to create such a pathogen exists and is understood; the medical system lacks critical baseline data needed to recognize and respond to new threats. By choosing Nipah virus, with its overlap of symptoms with COVID complications, the scenario writers inadvertently highlighted how current data gaps could prove catastrophic.
Public health requires honest assessment of vulnerabilities. The absence of systematic autopsy data represents more than a research oversight; it’s a strategic blind spot that could be exploited by adversaries or complicated by the natural emergence of new pathogens.
Demanding comprehensive autopsy programs and data transparency isn’t alarmist, it’s basic prudence. As the biodefense scenario demonstrates, tomorrow’s threats may arrive wearing familiar symptoms, exploit existing confusion, and spread while doctors debate diagnoses. Understanding the last crisis is probably the best way to prepare for the next.
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