In 1998, the Center for Health Security was founded as a non-governmental organization,

focused on studying how

vulnerable the United States population might be to biological weapons and what might be done

to lessen that vulnerability. Part of the mission has involved figuring out how to make

civilians and institutions around the world more resilient in the face of pandemics in general. And as a result,

in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, alongside other contributors

like the World Economic Forum, and at times the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, all

organizations that partially focus on pandemics as well, they set up a series of exercises to demonstrate what

different sorts of pandemics might look like, how they might emerge and progress, and what might

be done to ameliorate their worst impacts, as well as what might happen if we make the wrong choices.

These exercises are typically called tabletop exercises, not because they play out like a tabletop board game,

but because they involve experts sitting at a table, strategizing and working together,

making decisions and proposing policies in an effort to prevent the fictional but possible pandemics

posited by the Center for Health Security experts. Not entirely unlike a board game,

but actually quite a bit more like a game of very serious Dungeons and Dragons. These exercises

often have military operation style names, dark winter focused on a covert smallpox attack

in the United States, while Atlantic Storm had participants take

on the roles of transatlantic leaders responding to a bioterror attack.

Clayd X used real-world examples to teach attendees about how epidemics might be stopped

before they even get started.

And then there was Event 201, the most recent of these exercises,

which was predicated on a novel coronavirus emerging from pig farms in Brazil, which then

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