Biological War
A Scenario
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4.4 • 121 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Instant New York Times Bestseller!
New York Times Editors' Choice
New York Times Best Books of 2026 (So Far)
One of People's 15 Most Anticipated Books of Summer
The Next Big Idea Club's July 2026 Must-Read Books
One of the New York Times Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Reading This Summer
Sunset Magazine's 15 New Books You Don't Want to Miss
From Annie Jacobsen, the author of the bestselling Nuclear War: A Scenario, a book on a subject that has long orbited her reporting: biological warfare.
A lab accident, a bio-attack, a global pandemic, and the collapse of human society. In this essential new book, based on dozens of new interviews with experts with high-level political, governmental, medical, and military responsibility, Annie Jacobsen examines this very scenario. It would be only a matter of days from such a global infection before the infrastructure built to handle this gravest of situations would be in a battle for human existence.
The fallout: mass death, total societal breakdown, widespread insurrection, anarchy, and a plague-ravaged wasteland that no longer resembles modern civilization. In other words: dystopia.
Following the gripping narrative style that launched Nuclear War to the New York Times bestseller list, Jacobsen looks deeply at a situation that is in some ways the opposite of a nuclear bomb: There is no mushroom cloud, no shock wave or blast. Instead, the scenario that could end the world as we know it begins with something so small, and something so malicious, that when used for evil, only evil can result.
This is what could happen; a ticking-clock roadmap to the hours, days, and weeks following the release of a biological agent, that serves as the most essential, forward-looking journalism in preparation for urgent societal upheaval.
Customer Reviews
Interesting combination of facts with fiction
I enjoyed both aspects of this book. A lot of background information on the government’s infrastructure and how a hypothetical crisis could unfold.
A wildly ill-informed foray into biology and human behavior. Avoid.
Started out interesting and entertaining, but devolved into frankly stupid and anti-science and anti-vaccine gobbledygook. I wouldn’t trust anything in this book as a result.
Instances:
1) Author intimates that pneumonic plague can be transmitted within hours of exposure. Nope, that is not how it works.
2) Author describes a ludicrous scenario in which no efforts are made to stop a 100% fatal airborne pandemic. No lockdowns, no distribution of N95 masks. Really? We are on a pretty damned stupid timeline post-Covid, but not this stupid.
3) Author portrays a bioweapon in which a plague bacterium is genetically engineered with an encephalitis virus, and causes fatal encephalitis if the plague does not kill. Nope. Bacteria can be engineered to express encephalitis proteins, but not the entire virus. The proteins would not be able to cross the blood-brain barrier to cause encephalitis. A bacterium cannot be engineered to create a full, viable virus, as viruses that affect mammals are highly dependent on specific mammalian cell types to successfully reproduce.
4) Author included a laughable scenario in which a Russian vaccine causes birth defects in 100% of children whose mothers had received the vaccine years in the past. I am a physician. While certain live vaccines can cause birth defects if the mother is in the first trimester of pregnancy when she receives it, not a single vaccine is linked with birth defects when give to a women who isn’t pregnant. There is no plausible biological mechanism for such a thing. Vaccines create an immune response and then disappear from the body. Furthermore, nothing is 100% in medicine - even thalidomide doesn’t cause birth defects 100% of the time. This all is simply anti-vaccine claptrap.
5)Author makes the wildly erroneous assumption that people will devolve into violent anarchy in a crisis. This is a typical right-wing trope that has been repeatedly proven wrong. People mostly become cooperative and altruistic in a crisis — this has been shown repeatedly across history and societies. Even the Black Death did not cause violent societal collapse in Europe, though some people did abandon their family members, and there were antisemitic pogroms and accusations of witchcraft and poisonings. But a Mad Max scenario? Nope. Human beings’ need for companionship during a crisis is just too instinctually strong. None of us can survive long all alone, and we all know that.
I wish I could get my money back. Please don’t bother with this one. She gets so much stuff wrong that everything that she writes should be regarded as suspect.
Please Stop Using AI
Good book, good story and well written as usual but please for the love of everything stop using generative AI. You’re better than that.