For Event 201, hosted in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the experts added a new layer of realism by reaching beyond government and NGOs to leaders in the private sector and business community. Participants included representatives from NBCUniversal, UPS, and Johnson & Johnson.
“Very few people have included the private sector in pandemic preparedness, but that’s where most of the resources are,” Toner says.
That’s particularly true when it comes to vaccine development. The CAPS virus—which Toner describes as a cousin of SARS, “but slightly more transmissible, like the flu, and slightly more lethal”—was presented as resistant to any existing vaccine, as scientists scrambled to come up with one. Citizens, meanwhile, were rioting over scarce access to the next best thing: a fictional antiviral known to treat some CAPS symptoms.
That scenario, Toner says, is utterly realistic. “We don’t have a vaccine for SARS, or MERS, or various avian flu viruses that have come up in the past decade,” he notes. “That’s because vaccine development is slow and difficult if there isn’t an immediate market for it.”
In the simulation, CAPS resulted in a death toll of 65 million people within 18 months—surpassing the deadliest pandemic in history, the 1918 Spanish flu.
— Read on hub.jhu.edu/2019/11/06/event-201-health-security/