Amid increasing anxiety about a global outbreak of monkeypox, G7 health ministers participated in a wargame in Germany that depicted a global smallpox pandemic..“It is about finding out whether lessons have been learned from the mistakes of the past,” said German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach at the first press conference for the G7 scenario summit Thursday in Berlin..The scenario begins in 2023 with a leopard biting a human, which transmits a “dangerous smallpox virus to him.” The disease, named “Leopard Pox” then spreads quickly from person to person worldwide, eventually infecting billions..Lauterbach said that in the scenario, young people would be particularly impacted by the disease. "Not like in the COVID pandemic, where young people are by no means spared, but in the smallpox pandemic that we are simulating here, it’s going to be a pandemic that’s going to hit younger people very hard,” he said..During the scenario, the health ministers were given a description of the events of the pandemic as they unfold, before being given around 25 minutes to deliberate and develop their responses..Following the scenario on Friday, the G7 countries agreed to strengthen epidemiological early-warning systems to detect infectious diseases with pandemic potential. .The countries also want to increase compulsory contributions to the World Health Organization by 50% in the long term to ensure the health agency can fulfill its global leadership role..There have been a variety of pandemic simulation wargames held over the past few decades, including Dark Winter (2001), Global Mercury (2003), Atlantic Storm (2005), Clade X (2018), the pivotal Event 201 (October 2019), based on the events of the previous two years and SPARS Pandemic 2025-2028 (May 2020)..Event 201, held just months before the first COVID-19 lockdowns occurred in China, depicted a global Coronavirus pandemic that killed 65 million people. The event October 2019 wargame was hosted by the by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation..Many conspiracy theorists claimed the scenario was a test-run for the real coronavirus pandemic that happened months later. In January 2020, the organizers of Event 201 addressed reoccurring questions about whether their pandemic exercise “predicted the current novel coronavirus outbreak in China.”.“The Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise,” they said. “The exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic.”.In March 2021, a wargame held by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Munich Security Conference depicted a pandemic resulting from a "unusual strain of monkeypox virus.".The 18-month scenario resulted in more than three billion cases and 270 million fatalities worldwide.."Exercise participants agreed that, notwithstanding improvements following the global response to COVID-19, the international system of pandemic detection, analysis, warning, and response is woefully inadequate to address current and anticipated future challenges."
