In October, 2017, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security issued a report titled POSSIBLE FUTURE IN 2025.  The 70-page report assumed a pandemic and how health professionals would respond to various nuances of the outbreak.

             "This is a hypothetical scenario," the report starts.  "The infectious pathogen, medical countermeasures, characters, news media excerpts, social media posts, and government agency responses described herein are entirely fictional."

             With that context firmly established, the report developed a scenario called SPARS (St. Paul Acute Respiratory Syndrome) that developed in St. Paul, Minnesota after three church women returned from a mission trip to the Philippines where they contracted this strange disease from pigs.

             Just like military analysts at the Pentagon play war games as part of planning for future what ifs, medical think tanks practice pandemic games.  Remember, this was 2017.  It has now played out and we can see what these gamers got right and what they got wrong.  Fascinating.  Here is what this health crisis game got right:

             1.  Initially overestimated mortality count significantly.

            2.  Echo chamber of social media feeding itself, bifurcating.

            3.  Arrogance and sloppy narratives from government officials.

            4.  President served only one term.

            5.  Symptoms similar to flu, meaning most folks didn't know they had it.

            6.  Incubation period 6-10 days.

            7.  Social distancing encouraged.

            8.  Fast-tracked experimental vaccine developed and rolled out in 6 months.

            Here is what the Johns Hopkins gamers got wrong:

             1.  Children most vulnerable.

            2.  No censorship on social media, but government mandates that in order to view misinformation, you first had to watch a clip of authorized information.

            3.  Came from Philippines, not China, and pigs, not bats.

            4.  No school, restaurant, entertainment businesses closed.

            5.  No masks mentioned.

            6.  No designations for essential or nonessential business/employment.

             With 20/20 hindsight, a report like this is fascinating in its accuracy even though it missed some crucial elements.  Isn't it interesting to see a health game this close to its reality?  It would be like looking at the "China Attacks Taiwan" war game only two years after China attacked Taiwan.  So what does the report predict for the future of this SPARS outbreak?  That's where it's really interesting, inasmuch as it was right on for a fair amount of the game.  The future:  "neurological side effects" and "mental retardation."  This intensified lawsuits and compensation claims filed with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund (this was set up in 1985 as a result of the legislation shielding pharmaceutical companies from vaccine injury suits). 

             According to the report's predictions, even though many neurological effects emerged within a year of mass vaccinations, pharmaceutical companies and public health officials deflected blame, claiming that many in the initial treatment cohort had co-morbidities, rendering causation impossible to establish, even though correlation was strong enough to intuitively indict the fast-tracked vaccines.

             This led the fictional Dr. Flynn, director of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to say:  "Communities around the country went through what some felt was a harrowing public emergency, only to confront the later possibility, however slim, that the medicine we promised would help them may in fact be hurting them."

             And there the report ends, 5 years after the initial outbreak.  It took roughly 5 years from liability protection in 1985 and the resultant spike in infant vaccinations to see a spike in food allergies, autism and autoimmune diseases in 1990.

             All of this leads me to ask:  "What do they know that we don't?"