Catastrophic Contagion 2025 - Alert! Breaking News! Be Prepared!

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.

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.

Dozens of individuals from many organizations were essential to the success of this exercise. In particular we would like to acknowledge the following:

David Blazes, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Chelsea Hamby, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Frankie Francavilla, Interface Media Group
Loren Fitzgibbon, Empire Entertainment

From the Center for Health Security:

Eric Toner
Lucia Mullen
Tara Kirk Sell
Matthew Shearer
Debora Sandiford
Clint Haines
Andrea Lapp
Rachel Vahey
Sanjana Ravi
Diane Meyer
Prarthana Vasudevan
Anita Cicero
Tom Inglesby
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.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/2022-catastrophic-contagion/index.html