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FILE 068 · VOL XII · They Rehearsed This
They Rehearsed the Pandemic. Then Someone Sold the Ending.
A drill is only practice until somebody writes the ending.
Based on: Pandemic Rehearsal Exercises
Intake record
| Recovered from | Storage unit, Arlington, Virginia; contents sold at auction for unpaid rent |
|---|---|
| Contents | A ring binder of exercise inject cards, a burner phone, eleven printed text messages |
| Finder | Auction buyer |
| Status | Binder withheld. The last card is blank on both sides. |
| On the record | Real history is cited with numbered sources. Everything else, use your own judgment. |
Recovered file
Dana Okafor wrote disasters for a living, and she was very good at it.
Her firm built tabletop exercises for governments and companies: a conference table, a room full of officials, and a facilitator who reads cards aloud. A bridge collapses. A server farm goes dark. A virus jumps from pigs to people. The officials argue about what to do while the facilitator makes it worse, one card at a time.
These exercises are real, and some of them are famous. In June 2001, an exercise called Dark Winter at Andrews Air Force Base imagined a smallpox attack on the United States; former senators and officials playing the National Security Council watched it spread to twenty-five states. [1] From January to August 2019, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ran a series called Crimson Contagion, simulating a flu pandemic that began in China. Its draft report, later revealed by The New York Times, found the government underfunded, underprepared, and short of masks and ventilators. [2]
And on October 18, 2019, in New York, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a public exercise about a fictional new coronavirus spreading around the world. [3]
Ten weeks later, the real one started. In January 2020, Johns Hopkins issued a statement saying plainly that the exercise had not been a prediction. Millions of people decided they did not believe it. [3]
Dana believed it. She had written forty exercises. She knew how ordinary they were. That was what made the binder so strange.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 068 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.