Madrid
Updated:27/05/2022 00:44h
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This week we were telling you about the monkeypox outbreak that caught the United States by surprise twenty years ago, causing concern in Europe that the outbreak would cross the Atlantic. At that time it did not happen, as it has happened today. The Spanish Ministry of Health reported this Thursday that there are 84 confirmed cases of this rare and contagious disease throughout the country, while in the old continent those affected have quintupled in a week.
What was most striking in the 2003 news, however, was the US government’s suspicion that the outbreak was the work of the enemy. ‘Alert in the United States for a viral disease similar to smallpox’
, read the ABC headline on June 10 of that year. In the image, a prairie dog, the animal that was said to be the carrier of this condition. But inside, the correspondent in Washington, Pedro Rodríguez, pointed out: «The alarm has jumped from around thirty human infections concentrated in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, which have initially fueled fears of another ‘corrected and increased’ edition of 9/11 in the form of an apocalyptic bio-terrorism offensive.
Could an attack with a disease like smallpox have been perpetrated? The United States Government itself pointed out that it was: “The George W. Bush Administration has warned that Iraq and terrorist groups may have obtained doses of this virus after the chaotic end of the Soviet Union. To the point that before the intervention against Saddam Hussein’s regime, the White House has spoken in favor of vaccinating American health professionals,” the news could read.
In fact, the use of biological agents in warfare is a very old practice. Already in the Middle Ages, during the siege of Caffa – present-day Feodosia, located in the Republic of Crimea – the Tatar Army threw plague-infected corpses into the city. In the case of smallpox, it was used as a weapon, for example, by the English troops in their conflict against the French and the Amerindians between 1754 and 1767, causing an epidemic among the Indian tribes of the Ohio River Valley.
9/11 attacks
The discovery of the vaccine by Edward Jenner and its rapid spread throughout the world meant that smallpox ceased to be of interest as a biological weapon. However, following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, bioterrorism gained renewed interest, as Bush’s concern during the 2003 monkeypox outbreak demonstrated. occupied the front pages of the main newspapers in the world, sowing doubts among citizens as to whether their governments were prepared to face an attack of this type.
It is as if they had not had time to learn or it was very difficult, because these attacks were already common long before the destruction of the Twin Towers and even before World War II. The director of the biological weapons program of the former Soviet Union, Kenneth Abilek, revealed that his government, in 1980, had embarked on a successful program of manufacturing large quantities of the smallpox virus for use in intercontinental bombs and missiles. In fact, he acknowledged that Russia keeps it active and produces more virulent and contagious strains.
In this sense, this week we have read some headlines like ‘Ukraine: Could smallpox be the nuclear button that Putin presses?’. In addition, according to Juan Jesús Gestal, a member of the Royal National Academy of Pharmacy, in his article ‘Smallpox as a biological weapon’:
“As financial support for laboratories has declined sharply in recent years, concerns have grown that the knowledge may have fallen into non-Russian hands. Currently, only two WHO collaborating centers have the virus: the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta (United States) and the Vektor Research Institute in Novosibirsk, near Kazakhstan, 6,400 kilometers from Moscow. There is a fear that despite the physical barriers and controls established in Novosibirsk, some worker would have allowed himself to be bribed given his very low salary (55 euros per month), and that the smallpox virus could have passed into the hands of terrorists or of countries that support them.
“International Crime”
The academic explains that the voluntary reintroduction of smallpox could cause an “international crime of unpredictable proportions.” We must not forget that, in the past, some of its outbreaks killed 80% of those infected and that, during the 20th century, it killed more than 300 million people. “Well, its devastating potential is now much greater than before its eradication, as most of the population lacks immunity as vaccination was discontinued in many countries more than 25 years ago. In a susceptible and mobile population, smallpox can spread very rapidly across the country and the world,” he adds.
Although not voluntarily, some medical historians believe that the spread of this virus among the Aztec and Inca populations was a decisive factor in facilitating their defeat by the Spanish conquerors. Thanks to the smallpox epidemic among the soldiers of the Inca Empire, Francisco Pizarro was able to defeat Atahualpa’s Army of 80,000 soldiers with just a few men. It was not until the aforementioned confrontation between the British and the Indians, in the second half of the 18th century, that this contagious disease was used as a biological weapon for the first time in history.
It was General Jeffrey Amherst who ordered the delivery of blankets that had been used by smallpox patients among North American natives who militated with the French. This measure ended the lives of 50% of the affected tribes. For his part, Colonel Henry Bouquet became famous at Fort Pitt for decimating the indigenous population of the place, who had zero resistance to this new disease. In fact, 95% of the population died.
There are also numerous other accounts of Europeans knowingly infecting North American Indians with smallpox during that century and the next. Between 1861 and 1865, during the American Civil War, Southern Army doctors attempted to contaminate Union Army uniforms with yellow fever and again with smallpox, but were unsuccessful.
monkey pox
They also thought about it during the Second Civil War and the Cold War. In the 1940s, the United States and Britain launched production and testing programs for various infectious diseases, including smallpox, but never used them against the Axis powers during the conflict. Despite this, the former increased their production during the Cold War. They even had a program at the War Research Center in which they continued to investigate this biological weapon until 1971.
The USSR studied the possibility of using nothing less than monkeypox as a biological weapon until at least the early 1990s. As the ‘Mirror’ pointed out this week, this revelation came from Colonel Kanat Alibek, deputy head of the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program until its dismemberment in 1991, who recently stated that the communist giant had a program to determine which viruses could become potential weapons against the western enemy.
“We developed a special program to determine which viruses could be used instead of smallpox. We tested vaccinia virus, mousepox virus, rabbitpox virus, and monkeypox virus as models for smallpox […]. The idea was that all research and development work would be done using these virus models. Once we got positive results, it would take us only two weeks to perform the same manipulations with the smallpox virus and store the agent. We would have in our arsenal a genetically altered smallpox virus that could replace the previous one », he explained.
Putin’s shadow
As Alibek added in another 1998 interview, the Russian Defense Ministry decided to continue working with monkeypox to “create future biological weapons.” Shortly before, he was taken to the United States Congress, where he claimed to be “convinced that Russia’s biological weapons program has not been completely dismantled.”
At present, as retired Colonel Luis Martín Otero indicated on the Ser channel a month ago, we are thinking about Putin and his nuclear threats since the war in Ukraine began, but we were wrong. “The fear we have is that the Russians, because they have the smallpox strain, could develop a variant and use it. Right now the threat we have is not that he pushes the nuclear button, but rather to deter. My fear is that I press the biological or chemical button, ”said the expert in biological threats.
Martín Otero pointed out that an attack with a smallpox-type biological agent against human beings would cause devastation similar to that of a nuclear bomb, and above all at a much lower cost than this. That is why it is known as the nuclear weapon of poor countries.
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