Event 2022

Hopkins, Gates Foundation, Catastrophic Contagion, a pandemic tabletop exercise

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in partnership with WHO and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, conducted Catastrophic Contagion, a pandemic tabletop exercise at the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Brussels, Belgium, on October 23, 2022. https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/2022-catastrophic-contagion/

The extraordinary group of participants consisted of 10 current and former Health Ministers and senior public health officials from Senegal, Rwanda, Nigeria, Angola, Liberia, Singapore, India, Germany, as well as Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The exercise simulated a series of WHO emergency health advisory board meetings addressing a fictional pandemic set in the near future. Participants grappled with how to respond to an epidemic located in one part of the world that then spread rapidly, becoming a pandemic with a higher fatality rate than COVID-19 and disproportionately affecting children and young people.

Participants were challenged to make urgent policy decisions with limited information in the face of uncertainty. Each problem and choice had serious health, economic, and social ramifications. ====

https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/il-giornalista/labolizione-dellumano/

It's nice to wake up one morning and learn from the newspapers and television news that man, this superfluous hair of the universe, has been abolished. You sit there drinking your cup of coffee and you learn that there is no longer any need for man to give birth to man. Just a cell, some laboratory equipment, not even a seed, a mouse and the game is done. Mice and pigs now replace men and their organs, proving the ancient popular wisdom which attributed, with a prodigious premonition, to the female version of the two beasts the negative epithet for the woman who betrays the man. The accomplice of the genetic betrayal, the matchmaker for the unexpected adultery, is the scientist. Who is making a conscious effort to reduce man to a panda or koala, a frightened and marginal animal on the verge of extinction.

I don't know if we're right to pretend we haven't understood certain news, to exorcise them with irony or to consider them pure newspaper sensationalism, in any case risky and futuristic hypotheses that basically don't concern us. But every now and then, if we get out of the idiotic shell of the ego and think with the eyes of the species, we feel like letting ourselves die. God was abolished, and with him the immortality of the soul, by royal decree of Her Majesty Science, countersigned by the Queen Mother, Philosophy. Now man is abolished and with him the continuity of the species. Tiny mouse offal is enough to reproduce us. But that's not all: sex is also abolished, which had remained, from Freud to the viados, the last vital refuge and the last animal engine, beyond bodily needs; you don't even need sperm to give birth, just any fat, pinched by any beast, even a despised one. Of course, earthly optimists will also be able to say that in this way at least the birth crisis in the West is averted; and celestial optimists will be able to add that if a cell of a tiny animal can reproduce a humanoid life, it is proof that in the infinitely small there is already the infinitely large in a nutshell, i.e. the perfect correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm of ancient wisdom is confirmed. An ant has the whole universe within itself, as Zen wisdom already thought. An ant will save us, Pound said. it is the proof that in the infinitely small there is already the infinitely large in a nutshell, i.e. the perfect correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm of ancient wisdom is confirmed. An ant has the whole universe in itself, as Zen wisdom already thought. An ant will save us, Pound said. it is the proof that in the infinitely small there is already the infinitely large in a nutshell, i.e. the perfect correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm of ancient wisdom is confirmed. An ant has the whole universe in itself, as Zen wisdom already thought. An ant will save us, Pound said.

It will be a backward corporatism, in the literal sense, but it hurts to see man rendered obsolete and superfluous right down to his corporeality. The woman still resists, since "mater semper certo est" and the rape of the Sabine women acquires new meaning, which no longer alludes to the abduction of women but to the impregnation by the rape, a somewhat Boccionian stage name of the mouse, evoking the speed.

We keep joking so as not to despair. And so as not to wonder if the human adventure can really end like this, out of a thirst for power and experimentation. For millennia we have been inventing means to destroy; but this time we have invented one that strikes at the root of the entire human race across the face of the earth. Hope remains in its ineffectiveness, in its difficult globality, the arduous transition from experimental theory to practice, and finally, extrema spes, the wise ignorance of mankind and the healthy seething of instincts.

One can imagine a future in which humanity will split into two species: the mutants and the remaining ones, a radical crossroads in which we separate to go and inhabit different worlds. Humans and posthumans. Earthlings and Martians. Science does not solve the double madness of mortality and immortality. It promises only to change us and prolong life.

The post-man who envisages genetics is half god and half gnat; he lives like a god and dies like a gnat. Or otherwise. He loses pieces of humanity on both sides. Nobody can decide, in the end, how to deal with the genome. We are blind flies, parents of midges. We toss the coin in the air and then hope that the same coin does not fall from the sky but a dart of light. All this has no solution. Or rather it is resolved with a biscuit in a cup of milk, to prepare us with a morning ritual for the reassuring distractions of life. It's the small habits that save us from the big choices. Also in this we are little more equipped midges.

Then I see Rudi's sleeping child body in the dim light and I wonder: where will this body end up, this still fresh and dreamy life, into which funnel of the world it will plunge itself; Will there be a paradise of bodies where this image that releases light will be sheltered from time? Is it possible that of this shining face, dreaming of angels and angelic itself, only a pale and faded memory will remain in someone's eyes, just as fleeting? It would be an unheard-of waste of grace. Will there be a place beyond the places where he and I will meet? Life arches between returns and amnesia. The genome distorts life, but does not solve its mystery.

MV, The Wayfarer's Secret (Mondadori, 2003)