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8 An observer I know Winter, which was held over the course of three days in June 2001 at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. Surprisingly, Dark Winter wasn't organized by the federal government, but by independent organizations whose leaders were growing increasingly concerned about the potential of a bioterror attack on the United States and wanted to draw attention to the problem. Dark Winter supposed that a terrorist group releases smallpox in Philadelphia, Oklahoma City, and Atlanta, infecting a total of 3,000 people. Less than two months later, the disease had spread to 3 million people and killed one million, with no end in sight.8 An observer I know commented that the outcome was: Smallpox 1, Humanity 0. Other exercises followed: Atlantic Storm in 2005 (another smallpox attack), Clade X in 2018 (an outbreak of a novel influenza virus), Event 201 in 2019 (an outbreak of a novel coronavirus), a simulation at the Munich Security Conference in 2020 (a bio-attack involving an engineered influenza virus).* Even though each of these U.S. exercises imagined different scenarios, were run in different ways, and used different methods, they had three things in common. One is that their conclusions are fundamentally the same--there are huge gaps in America's and much of the world's ability to contain outbreaks and prevent a pandemic--and they propose various ways to fill those gaps. * The Gates Foundation was one of the funders of the Event 201 exercise. Some conspiracy theorists suggested that it predicted COVID. As the organizers made clear, it wasn't a prediction, and they said so at the time. You can find a statement about this at centerforhealthsecurity.org.