The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

A pair of recent events had pushed the threat of bioterrorism to the front of the minds of the people who worked in and around national security. One was the series of anthrax attacks on Capitol Hill in October 2001; the other was an exercise conducted a few months before those attacks, called Dark Winter. In the summer of 2001, a bunch of smart people in and around the U.S. government gathered at Andrews Air Force Base and thought through a bioterrorist attack on the U.S. population. In the imaginary attack, on shopping malls in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Oklahoma City, three thousand Americans are infected with smallpox. The disease had been eradicated in the 1970s, vaccine was scarce, and so the U.S. population was vulnerable to any new introduction of the virus. The imaginary exercise did not end well. Just a few months after the hypothetical attack, three million Americans were infected. A million were dead.