Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism

by Brian Frydenborg

Overview

To say the current coronavirus pandemic is overwhelming for people would be a gross understatement. For most Americans and huge swaths of the entire human race, few aspects of their daily lives have been untouched by the most significant public health event in a century. Those living in times of historic upheaval are rarely able to grasp the meaning of their suffering, nor do they usually see how their current challenges and era fit into the larger tapestry of history.

Freelance journalist and independent academic and historian Brian Frydenborg presents the big picture as only he can, building on his two decades of analysis of policy, politics, conflict, and international affairs that has consistently been dramatically far ahead of even most of the top journalists and news outlets out there. In Frydenborg's unique, deep exploration of the past, present, and future that defined, are defining, and will define the COVID-19 moment and its deeply uncertain aftermath, readers will gain a unique historical perspective that places the coronavirus pandemic in the larger societal, cultural, racial, socio-economic, international, and even strategic and tactical military contexts necessary to truly understand the forces that led to this disaster, that are confronting us now, and will surely challenge us in the future.

By looking at the history of biowarfare and bioterrorism, then looking at the history of our own failures at unconventional and asymmetric warfare and the patterns those failures reveal, we lay the groundwork both for understanding why the coronavirus pandemic is very similar to unconventional, asymmetric threats and far more deeply understand why America has had such a spectacularly bad response to the coronavirus relative to many other countries. We can then understand how, even more terrifyingly, the coronavirus era has made bioweapons both more attractive to our enemies and more likely to be used by them, all this on top of the development of recent groundbreaking technology destroying so many barriers to making bioweapons and acquiring the material needed to do so. After that, we can understand how the coronavirus pandemic has exposed our weaknesses in ways that demonstrate how existentially vulnerable we are to anything worse, be it a natural pandemic or a man-made bioassault. Finally, we can see in the epilogue how all this comes together, including how history, coronavirus, and political warfare during the 2020 election are creating a true test for our democracy, our society, and our citizens, and how not only systemic structural shifts are necessary to protect our people and our democracy from these threats, but cultural and societal ones, too.

It is incumbent on all Americans to understand why American leaders, society, and even our fellow citizens catastrophically failed to rise to the occasion and instead undertook one of the least effective national responses on the entire planet; this short book is as good a place to start as any to look past the immediate moment and get to more meaningful, broader truths as we just begin to explore how we will attempt to move forward amidst a raging global pandemic.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940162722014
Publisher:	Brian E Frydenborg
Publication date:	05/28/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Brian Frydenborg has a cross-disciplinary background of two decades in humanitarian aid/relief, international development, international affairs, government, public policy, politics, writing, journalism, research, and consulting. He grew up in in a suburb of New York City called Weston, Connecticut, and attended Canterbury School in New Milford, CT. As an undergraduate at Washington and Lee University, he engaged in a rigorous double major program of Politics and History. His main abroad experience in college was in Japan, but he also had more minor experiences in Cuba and Europe. Upon graduation, he volunteered for several political campaigns in Boston, including the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where a chance meeting with then-Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and his Chief-of-Staff eventually led to an internship in the Senator's Washington, DC, office in 2006.

After doing substantive work in the United States Senate while just an intern, and after some time in the private sector, he began his graduate studies at George Mason University's School of Public Policy. While also working part-time, he completed his Master of Science (M.S.) in Peace Operations, with his program defining a peace operation “as an intervention into a complex contingency [due to conflict and/or natural disaster] for the purpose of maintaining or restoring peace.” The completion of his degree included studying abroad in Liberia—evaluating the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL)—and also included studying abroad in Israel and the West Bank, Palestine, examining the conflict there.

During 2014-2019, he was based in Amman, Jordan, freelancing mainly as a writer and a consultant, a career in which he recently has had well about 200 articles published by a wide range of different outlets, including Newsweek, The Jerusalem Post, Modern War Institute at West Point, The London School of Economics and Politics Middle East Centre, Real Clear Defense, Real Clear History, The Jordan Times, MSN, Venture Magazine, Al Bawaba, Business Insider, Small Wars Journal, Iranian Student News Agency, War Is Boring, Mic, Movie Pilot, Russian International Affairs Council, Global Risk Insights, Medium, Hidden Remote, and others. Brian runs his own news website, Real Context News https://realcontextnews.com, specializing in deep-dives and generous context. He can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (where you can follow him at @bfry1981).