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
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