The pandemic agenda, important to maintaining a healthy market for mRNA vaccines, is reliant on a general sense of fear and urgency to achieve success. Mitigating against this is the unfortunate decline in infectious disease and dearth of recent naturally derived pandemics. With COVID-19 fading and looking worryingly unnatural in origin, the pandemic industry is developing an increasing interest in ancient history, when its offerings may have proven more useful.

In the year 1347 the armies of the Kipchak Turkic confederation under the Khan Janibeg, who were attacking the Genoese fortress at Kaffa in the Crimea, catapulted dead bodies over the walls into the city. This was not done simply for aesthetics. It was an early form of biowarfare. The bodies had belonged to people who died of a new plague that had spread from Central Asia to devastate the Kipchak army. The survivors, figuring out that once a bunch of people had this plague it spread to almost everyone in close contact, decided that they should share this knowledge with the Genoese defenders as well. The airborne corpse approach did the trick.

Soon after, some of the defenders sailing home to Italy stopped off at Syracuse in Sicily for provisions and some shore time (or perhaps in desperation to leave pestilence-ridden ships). Attempts to quarantine them were too late, and the Black Death had entered Europe. It would have got there overland anyway, but in this age of expanding international travel driven by galley slaves and improved harnessing of the wind, spread happened lightning fast and it had reached England by the following year. Bubonic plague spread from port to city to village by people and rats, or the fleas ubiquitous to both.

Read more: The Pandemic Industry is Preparing for its Next Bonanza