The pandemic agenda, important to maintaining a healthy market for mRNA vaccines, is reliant on a general sense of fear and urgency to achieve success. Mitigating against this is the decline in infectious disease and dearth of recent naturally derived pandemics. With COVID-19 fading and looking worryingly unnatural in origin, the pandemic industry is developing an increasing interest in ancient history, when its offerings may have proven more useful.
Biowarfare and Big Death Events
In the year 1347 the armies of the Kipchak Turkic confederation under the Khan Jani Beg, who were attacking the Genoese fortress at Kaffa in the Crimea, catapulted dead bodies over the walls into the city. This was not done simply for aesthetics. It was an early form of biowarfare. The bodies had belonged to people who died of a new plague that had spread from Central Asia to devastate the Kipchak army. The survivors, figuring out that once a bunch of people had this plague it spread to almost everyone in close contact, decided that they should share this knowledge with the Genoese defenders as well. The airborne corpse approach did the trick.
David Bell
Author
David Bell, senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), programme head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, Wash.
