Outbreak To Anarchy In Six Days

That’s not my estimate. It’s the Defense Department’s–and they’ve already built the plan for day seven.

Author’s Note

I watched bestselling author Annie Jacobsen’s interview on the Shawn Ryan Show twice.

The first time, I watched it the way you watch anything…half-attentive…phone nearby… letting the interesting parts wash over me.

Somewhere around the point where she started explaining what happens to the President in a bunker…alone…with a gas mask…I realized I’d stopped moving.

So…I watched it again. This time with a notebook.

And…what I found the second time through…was that the most important material wasn’t the dramatic stuff. It was the vocabulary.

The bureaucratic terms she kept dropping almost in passing…devolution…COGCON…continuity of government…hot sites and cold sites…the National Capital Region…that describe an entire architecture of federal planning…most Americans have never heard a word about.

Not because it’s secret. Because it’s dull on the surface…and written in a language none of us speak.

That’s what I wanted to fix.

So…I broke it into pieces. Verified what I could against primary documents…FEMA’s own directives…CDC’s own program pages…the published lab research.

Corrected two things Jacobsen got imprecise in conversation…because a two-hour interview isn’t a fact-check…and she’d be the first to say so.

Cut two segments entirely that I didn’t think served you. And…organized the rest into chunks…you can actually hold in your head: the three questions…the gap in the surveillance system…the antibiotic distribution problem…the legal machinery.

The goal is not to frighten you. It’s the opposite. Vague dread is what you get when you know something is out there but can’t name it. Specific knowledge is what replaces dread with the ability to think.

You should read her book. Biological War: A Scenario is the full version…and it’s excellent. This is the briefing for the drive there.

Take your time with it.

-Jack

Outbreak To Anarchy In Six Days

That’s not my estimate. It’s the Defense Department’s–and they’ve already built the plan for day seven.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #989: Tuesday, August 4th, 2026

Let me start with a number that should stop you cold.

Seventy-two minutes.

That’s how long it takes, according to Strategic Command…to go from a nuclear launch to nuclear winter. Annie Jacobsen built an entire book around that number. Not seventy-two hours. Not seventy-two days. Minutes.

Now here’s the number from her new one, Biological War: A Scenario.

Six days.

Outbreak to anarchy. That’s the Defense Department’s own math on what happens to the United States after a serious biological event. Not the infection curve…the social curve.

*Annie Jacobsen

Six days from the first cluster to the point where the government stops trying to govern…and starts trying to survive.

And…here’s the part almost nobody knows….which is the reason I’m writing this at all.

There is a plan for what happens on day seven. It is a real…funded…operational federal program. Its name has been declassified. Everything else about it has not.

It’s called devolution.

What devolution actually is

Evolution moves forward. Devolution moves back. That’s the whole concept…and it’s exactly as blunt as it sounds.

When a catastrophe reaches the threshold…mass casualties…government continuity in question…the center no longer holding…a pre-selected list of officials disappears into hardened facilities.

The reporting describes them as hot sites…warm sites…and cold sites…depending on readiness. Those people wait. Then they rebuild the government.

You don’t have to take this on faith.

Pull up FEMA’s Federal Continuity Directive 1; it’s a public document…and read the required-planning elements.

Every federal department and agency must plan for orders of succession…delegations of authority…primary and alternate locations…essential records…devolution…and reconstitution.

The word is right there in the compliance checklist…sitting between “essential records” and “reconstitution” like it’s a routine line item. Which, institutionally speaking.. it is.

Jacobsen got Craig Fugate, Obama’s FEMA director…to walk her right up to the legal edge of what can be said about the classified portion.

Fugate signed off on the 2017 version…and that document is the baseline every subsequent update is built from. The architecture hasn’t changed. Only the names on the list.

*Former FEMA Director Craig Fugate

And…those names are classified. Who is on the list: classified. How the list is chosen: classified.

The reasonable inference…which Jacobsen makes…and I’ll repeat as inference rather than fact…is that it turns over with each administration. No sitting president is going to leave the last guy’s people holding the keys to the reconstituted republic.

So picture what that meeting looks like. Somewhere in Washington…someone maintains a shadow roster: a second Secretary of Defense. A second National Security Adviser. A second chair for the president himself. Health officials. Judges. A full mirror government…sitting on a shelf…waiting for the first one to die.

There’s an activation ladder for it, too. You know DEFCON…five levels, and 9/11 took us to three. There’s a civilian equivalent almost nobody has heard of…and it’s called COGCON.

The Continuity of Government Readiness Conditions system establishes readiness levels for the federal executive branch…focusing on possible threats to the National Capital Region.

Four levels provide for incremental increases in the deployment of people and resources. COGCON 4 is the day-to-day level…with federal employees at their normal work locations.

At COGCON 1…the president orders full deployment of continuity staff to perform essential functions from alternate facilities…with all alternate sites required to report operational within two hours.

Two hours. That’s the design spec.

That’s the part I want you to sit with. Not the bunkers. The vocabulary. National Capital Region. Continuity of government. Devolution. Reconstitution.

A whole private language…built so that the people who speak it…can discuss the end of the country in a room without any of us understanding what we’re overhearing.

Why bio and not nuclear

Ask most people to name the worst weapon…and they say nuclear. Reasonable. Wrong…according to the Pentagon’s own threat spectrum.

Nuclear weapons are the most destructive. Biological weapons are rated the greatest overall threat. And the reason…is not sophistication. It’s the opposite.

You cannot build a nuclear weapon in your basement. Eighty years of proliferation effort…and the barrier to entry is still enormous; not the physics…but the engineering… the arming and firing systems…the material. That barrier is the whole reason we’re not already dead.

Biology has no such barrier.

Genetic modification was invented in a Stanford lab in 1971. Today…the tools are cheap…documented…and taught. Jacobsen’s sources told her a student with limited training…can perform meaningful genetic edits. High schoolers compete at this in science competitions.

That’s not alarmism. That’s the industry describing itself.

And…here’s the second thing that makes bio different…which is the detail I keep turning over: it’s the only category of catastrophic threat in the Defense Department’s framework that doesn’t require an attacker. It can be an incident.

A lab leak counts. Nobody has to want it.

The three questions, and the one that changed

Every biological event reduces to three questions. Learn them…and you can follow any outbreak story for the rest of your life…without needing an expert to interpret it for you.

One: how do I get it?

Transmissibility. A tick-borne disease has to bite you. A droplet disease needs someone coughing on you. An airborne pathogen lingers in a room after everyone leaves. Airborne is the one that ends things…because the delivery system becomes the human lung…and there is no way to shut it off.

Two: how likely is it to kill me?

Virulence. COVID’s global average ran near 1%, though that number varied enormously by age…region…and period…treat it as a rough marker…not a constant. Pneumonic plague…untreated, approaches 100%.

Three: is there something that fixes it?

Medical countermeasure. Antibiotics kill plague…because plague is a bacterium. Roughly a 24-hour window.

For most of modern history…those three variables were fixed properties of a given pathogen. You inherited what nature gave you.

Genetic engineering made all three editable. That’s the entire story. You can take something that isn’t airborne…and make it airborne. You can take something antibiotics cure…and make it antibiotic-resistant.

And…I’m going to leave the worst historical example at the level of description rather than detail…because the details don’t help anyone: Soviet scientists, by their own later admission, engineered a plague weapon designed so that the treatment itself would harm you.

The stated intent, from the defectors who revealed it…was that Americans would die believing their own government had poisoned them.

That’s decades old. That’s scissors-and-tape genetic engineering compared to what exists now.

The gap nobody is guarding

Here’s where this stops being abstract.

After 9/11 and the anthrax letters…which, let’s note in passing…the FBI never conclusively resolved…the government built out biodefense at enormous scale.

Part of that build is the CDC’s National Syndromic Surveillance Program…and it is genuinely impressive: 83% of U.S. emergency departments send data to NSSP…often within 24 hours…and more than 9.6 million electronic health messages arrive every day.

It tracks symptoms before diagnosis is confirmed…which is what lets public health spot unusual illness levels early enough to act.

Impressive. Also incomplete.

Jacobsen’s epidemiologist sources pointed her at the hole…and HHS confirmed it: roughly 800,000 homeless Americans do not appear in that system. No consistent healthcare contact…no reporting…no data.

Now…think like an adversary for exactly one second…and then stop.

Where do you have dense population…no medical baseline…no surveillance coverage… and symptoms that get attributed to something else entirely?

You have just described the largest blind spot in American biodefense…and it is sitting in plain view in every major city in the country.

That’s why Jacobsen starts her outbreak there. Not for drama. Because that’s where the professionals told her to look.

The cipro problem

Los Angeles keeps a stockpile of ciprofloxacin…the antibiotic used against anthrax and plague. One hundred thousand bottles.

Sounds like a lot. Then…you look at the distribution plan…and find a chunk allocated to first responders…which is correct and necessary…and the rest parceled out across various municipal departments…in ways that raise a reasonable eyebrow. Then you get to the delivery mechanism.

Volunteers.

Now…run it forward. A fast-moving pathogen. A city that has publicly struggled to answer 911 calls on an ordinary Tuesday. An announcement goes out about where the medicine is. It goes viral in minutes…because everything does.

And now…every parent in a metro area of ten million people…is trying to reach the same distribution points, believing…correctly or not…that what’s in those boxes is the difference between their kid living…and dying.

Jacobsen interviewed a Los Angeles fire commissioner, Jimmy Hara…who died in a car accident last year. His assessment was not hedged: the city is not prepared for this.

That’s the mechanism. That’s how you get from outbreak to anarchy…without anyone intending it. Not villainy. Desperation…plus a distribution plan built by people who never war-gamed a stampede.

*Tom Daschle

Tom Daschle…whose own office received weaponized anthrax in 2001…and who has worked on biodefense ever since…gave Jacobsen the line that stays with me. He said the worst of it wouldn’t be the physical death or the governmental death. It would be people doing inhuman things to other people just to survive.

What happens to the Constitution

Once that starts, the response is legally straightforward…and genuinely unsettling.

The military can already operate domestically in a supporting role…that’s the National Guard under a governor…no combat rules of engagement. That’s the version you’ve seen after hurricanes.

The other lane is the Insurrection Act.

It’s the mechanism that sets aside Posse Comitatus…the post–Civil War law barring the military from domestic law enforcement.

The president can invoke it at his own discretion. In a catastrophic biological event… Jacobsen’s reporting says it will be invoked.

At that point…the military operates under rules of engagement. On American soil. Guarding critical infrastructure…the grid…the water plants…the roads…the banking systems…and guarding the devolution sites where the shadow government is waiting.

Do the arithmetic anyway. There are roughly 340 million Americans…and an estimated 500 million firearms in private hands. There is no number of troops that makes that equation resolve cleanly.

Which is, I suspect…exactly why the planning stopped being about protecting the population and became about continuity of government.

Civil defense…the old Cold War idea that you could save the public from itself… is over. What replaced it is a plan to save the institution.

Read that sentence again.

The plan is not to save you. The plan is to make sure something survives…that can eventually govern whoever’s left.

Nobody is counting the labs

Two claims to close on…and I want to be precise about both…because this is where the interview overstates…and the published research is actually more damning.

Start with the finding that underwrites everything else. From the 2025 global mapping study in the Journal of Public Health: no international organization has a comprehensive register or global oversight of BSL-3 or BSL-4 laboratories…and different countries use different standards for designating pathogens and labs.

Sit with that. Not “oversight is weak.” There is no register. Nobody, anywhere, maintains a list.

You can see the consequence in the fact that the counts don’t agree with each other. The Global BioLabs Report 2023…out of King’s College London and George Mason, identified 51 BSL-4 labs across 27 countries.

The 2025 mapping study puts the figure north of 100. The WHO has published a lower number still. These are serious researchers using different methods on incomplete public data…because incomplete public data is all that exists.

Now the level below. BSL-3 is where researchers work with anthrax, plague, and hantavirus. The mapping study identified 3,515 BSL-3 labs…with detailed geolocation and pathogen information publicly available for only about 955 of them…roughly 27%.

Nearly three-quarters of the facilities handling those pathogens don’t publicly disclose where they are or what they’re working on.

And…the oversight number…this is the one the interview got wrong…and the correct version is worse in a different way.

It’s not that 90% of labs lack safety protocols. It’s that more than 90% of the countries hosting at least one BSL-3 laboratory have no oversight or regulation of dual-use research of concern. Individual labs may run tight operations. The point is that almost nowhere on earth is there a government requiring it.

The Global BioLabs team put it plainly: oversight systems meant to ensure life sciences research is conducted safely and responsibly are falling behind…and an urgent overhaul is needed.

That’s not a conspiracy. That’s an org chart with a hole in it…and the people best qualified to see the hole have been saying so in public for years.

The credibility problem, stated fairly

I want to handle this next part carefully…because the sloppy version of it is everywhere…and the sloppy version is why nobody listens.

The institutional failure of COVID was not that CDC and WHO were uncertain early. They were uncertain…and uncertainty was the correct posture.

The failure was that they projected confidence…they did not have…telling the public a pathogen was not airborne when they didn’t know…on the single most important variable in the entire event.

The correction did come. CDC’s scientific brief…updated May 7, 2021, lists inhalation of fine respiratory droplets and aerosol particles as the first of three principal exposure routes.

WHO and CDC officially acknowledged aerosol inhalation as a main mode of SARS-CoV-2 spread at both short…and long range in April and May of 2021 respectively.

So: over a year late, and delivered as a technical revision rather than as an acknowledgment. Not a lie. But not a reckoning either.

That gap…between the confident early denial and the quiet later revision…is where public trust went to die.

And…you cannot run a biological emergency response without public trust. Diagnostics only work if people test. Countermeasures only work if people come get them. Every mechanism in the plan…assumes a population that believes what it’s told.

Jacobsen proposes retiring the phrase “conspiracy theory” in favor of “speculative narrative,” and I’ve come around to it.

Not because every wild claim deserves equal footing…it doesn’t. But…because “conspiracy theory” is a verdict…and once you render it you can’t revise it without humiliation.

“Speculative narrative” leaves the door open. It permits the sentence that is currently missing from American public life, which is: I might be wrong about this.

So what do you do with this

Not panic. I’ve said it before…and it hasn’t changed: preparation and panic are opposites. The prepared person is calm precisely because they’ve already decided what they’d do.

The water…the medications…the radio…the printed contact list…the cash…that list didn’t change from the last time I gave it to you…and it still covers the ice storm and the water main break and the cyber incident and this. Preparation doesn’t care what caused the disruption.

But there’s a second thing, and it matters more.

Learn the three questions.

Know that devolution exists and that FCD-1 is a public document you can read tonight.

Know that there are 3,515 BSL-3 labs and no registry.

And…demand that the people who built a two-hour activation timeline for their own relocation…spend a fraction of that rigor on days one through six…the window when this is still preventable.

They built a plan for after.

Ask them what they’ve built for before.

#HoldFast

Back soon.

-Jack

Jack Hopkins

P.S.

Do one thing before you close this tab.

Open Federal Continuity Directive 1. It’s on FEMA’s website, it’s unclassified…and it takes ninety seconds to find the section listing what every federal agency must plan for. Read the line. Devolution. Sitting there between essential records and reconstitution like a routine compliance item.

I’m not asking you to take my word for any of this. I’m asking you to see it in the government’s own document…in the government’s own language…because there’s a particular thing that happens the moment you do. The story stops being something a newsletter told you and becomes something you found.

That shift matters more than anything I wrote above it.

Because the reason none of this is secret…and almost none of it is…isn’t that it’s hidden. It’s that it’s boring on the surface…written in a private vocabulary…and buried in a PDF nobody has a reason to open. That’s a better hiding place than classification ever was.

Ninety seconds. Then you’ll know.

Sources

The book and the interview

• Annie Jacobsen, Biological War: A Scenario — Penguin Random House

• Interview: Annie Jacobsen on the Shawn Ryan Show (transcript excerpts referenced throughout)

Devolution and COGCON — the primary documents

• FEMA, Federal Continuity Directive 1 (January 2017) — full PDF. This is the document Craig Fugate signed off on. Devolution and reconstitution appear by name in the required-planning elements.

• FEMA, National Continuity Policy Implementation Plan — COGCON structure and the four readiness levels

• FEMA, Federal Continuity Directive 1 (2007 original) — PDF

• Background on the four COGCON levels and activation timelines — Veteran.com summary

The surveillance system and its gap

• CDC, National Syndromic Surveillance Program — program overview (83% of U.S. emergency departments reporting, 9.6 million health messages daily)

• CDC, NSSP in emergency response

The labs

• Journal of Public Health (2025), global mapping of BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities — study

• Global BioLabs Initiative, King’s College London / George Mason — Global BioLabs Report 2023 (PDF) and policy briefs

• Science — Growing number of high-security pathogen labs around world raises concerns

The airborne question

• CDC Scientific Brief, updated May 7, 2021 — SARS-CoV-2 transmission, including inhalation of aerosols

• Science — Airborne transmission of respiratory viruses, which dates the official WHO and CDC acknowledgments to April and May 2021