Annie Jacobsen says Soviet scientists engineered plague with a euphoria gene so victims would go to discos

The nightmare germ in Annie Jacobsen’s scenario does not just kill you, it makes you want to go out. On Modern Wisdom, Jacobsen says Soviet researchers engineered plague with a “gene for euphoria” so infected people would feel good enough to mingle in public before collapsing.

That is gruesomely specific. Not vague lab-leak fog. Not prestige-TV fungus with cheekbones. Jacobsen says the target was Yersinia pestis, the bacterium behind plague, and that the cruel innovation was behavioral: make the victim an unwitting superspreader before the symptoms force them under the covers.

Why did I choose plague? I chose it for an incredibly sinister reason that is based in science because I I am a non-fiction author.

As podcast payload, this is premium nightmare fuel. As established fact, it needs a warning label. The Soviet bioweapons program was real, and bioweapons history is full of ideas that sound like rejected Bond-villain dialogue until you read the files. But the clip gives us Jacobsen’s account of what a source told her, not the paper trail. Also, biology does not usually come with a single switch labeled Disco Mode.

The disco is the weapon

The most disturbing part of Jacobsen’s claim is not the lethality. It is the social engineering. A normal sick person becomes boring, useful, containable. They cough, panic, stay home, seek care. Jacobsen’s euphoria plague flips that script. It turns the first day of infection into the last night out.

Absolutely. It is genetically modified to have euphoria. So the first 24 hours people are spent euphoric and they only essentially collapse into the disease when the euphoria wears off and now they’re shedding bacteria. They’re infecting people like nobody’s business. And they’ve been at places like discos.

That is the clever horror of the claim. Containment depends on the infected acting infected. Public-health systems look for fevers, coughs, ER visits, clusters. Jacobsen is imagining a pathogen that makes the early warning signs socially invisible because the host is having, in the bleakest possible phrasing, a great time.

The scarier part is the boring gap

Jacobsen then plants the outbreak in Los Angeles, specifically a homeless encampment, after describing the CDC’s BioSense network, a post-9/11 surveillance system fed by thousands of hospitals, urgent care facilities, and emergency rooms. Her phrasing about homelessness is severe enough to make you wince, but the underlying point is not exotic. If the surveillance system depends on formal care, people outside formal care become the blind spot.

America’s 800,000 homeless people are not part of that system.

That is where Jacobsen sounds less like she is writing apocalypse and more like she is describing a spreadsheet nobody wants to own. Pandemics don’t need cinematic chaos to spread. They need delay, denial, bad access, crowded conditions, and institutions that notice too late. Homelessness becomes terrifying here not because unhoused people are the villain, but because being uncounted is a public-health failure with teeth.

She says her scenario moves from outbreak to anarchy in six days. That is a thriller clock, and a very polished one. The stronger claim is simpler: in a fast-moving biological attack, the state’s first instinct may stop being rescue and become continuity. Keep roads, water, nuclear plants, and Defense Department facilities functioning. Save the machine before the crowd.

It’s too late. It’s too late. And I was really stunned to learn that at that point the pivot is not let’s try and protect the population. It’s let’s we need to protect critical infrastructure.