Eric Toner

Eric Toner (health bureaucrat, doctor)
Nationality	US
Alma mater	University of Virginia
Member of	Covid Commission Planning Group
Project director and principal designer of the influential pandemic exercises Clade X and Event 201, which reflected many of his ideas on the subject.

Dr. Eric Toner is a Senior Scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a Senior Scientist in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He was the project director and principal designer of the influential pandemic exercises Clade X and Event 201.

He is part of the circle of experts] who have dominated pandemic planning for decades, always predicting an alleged doomsday "Global Catastrophic Biological Event" that requires drastic measures.

Career

Toner has been involved in hospital disaster planning since the mid-1980s. Prior to joining the Center, he was Medical Director of Disaster Preparedness at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland, where he practiced emergency medicine for 23 years. In 2003, he spearheaded the creation of a coalition of disaster preparedness personnel from the 5 Baltimore County hospitals, the health department, and the Office of Emergency Management. During this time, he also headed a large emergency medicine group practice and co-founded and managed a large primary care group practice and an independent urgent care center.

Prior to COVID-19 , where he directed Event 201, he authored scores of scholarly papers and government reports on healthcare and pandemic preparedness, and he organized numerous meetings of national leaders on the topics of hospital preparedness, pandemic influenza, emerging infectious diseases, mass casualty disasters, biosecurity, and nuclear preparedness.

He has spoken at many national and international conferences on a range of biosecurity topics and appeared on a number of high-profile national television and news features on pandemic flu and bioterrorism preparedness. He was the project director and principal designer of the influential pandemic exercises Clade X and Event 201 and has been the principal investigator of several US government-funded projects to assess and advance healthcare preparedness. Dr. Toner was on a number of national working groups and committees.

The Characteristics of Pandemic Pathogens

In 2018 he co-wrote the study "The Characteristics of Pandemic Pathogens; Improving Pandemic Preparedness by Identifying the Attributes of Microorganisms Most Likely to Cause a Global Catastrophic Biological Event". The stated aim of the study was "to provide an inductive, microbe-agnostic analysis of the microbial world to identify fundamental principles that underlie this special category of microorganisms that have potential to cause global catastrophe."

The study predicted: "since RNA viruses that are spread via the respiratory route have the characteristics that are most concerning in terms of their ability to cause global catastrophic threats, surveillance, science, and countermeasure development programs and efforts should logically allocate significant resources to them."

The analysis mentioned several notions that later could be seen as dogma in the official thinking around the COVID-19 event:

"Irrespective of the biological class of a pathogen, several attributes are likely to be essential components of any GCBR-level pathogen. These traits include efficient human-to-human transmissibility, an appreciable case fatality rate, the absence of an effective or widely available medical countermeasure, an immunologically naïve population, virulence factors enabling immune system evasion, and respiratory mode of spread. Additionally, the ability to transmit during incubation periods and/or the occurrence of mild illnesses would further augment spread."

The study also mentioned laboratory manipulation of viruses:

"Although most classes of microbe could evolve or be manipulated in ways that would cause a catastrophic risk to humans, viruses—especially RNA viruses—are the most likely class of microorganism to have this capacity"......"Because of the higher likelihood that a GCBR-level threat might emerge from the group of RNA viruses with respiratory spread, special attention to research on these agents is warranted if the work could increase pandemic risks. While much research on this class of viruses is low risk, experimentation on antiviral resistance, vaccine resistance, and enhanced transmission, for example, could raise major biosafety concerns if a biosafety breach occurred."

And failed vaccines: "Vaccines against RNA respiratory viruses should be pursued with increased priority, as no highly efficacious vaccines, including against influenza, are commercially available today. Vaccines could be used to quench nascent outbreaks or to pre-vaccinate target populations"...."Experimental vaccines targeting [respiratory syncytial viruses] have made it to late clinical development only to fail."

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Clade X	15 May 2018	15 May 2018		A pandemic/biowarfare preparation exercise by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Held May 2018.
Event 201	18 October 2019	18 October 2019	New York US	A Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security/World Economic Forum/Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored large scale simulation of a global coronavirus pandemic predicting an apocalyptic outcome. Held October 2019.

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