The Last Centurion: Chapter Three

Three Sentences All Alike In Fuckedup'edness

    That was the other part of my mostly going back to sleep. You see, I was (and am to a lesser extent) a skeptic. Global warming, resource depletion, all the rest of the mantra the left constantly used to scare us. It went in one ear and out the other. If somebody told me the sky was falling, I wouldn't look up.

    This time I got hit in the head by a chunk of sky. But I wasn't the only one.

    Here's what was really happening as we can see with blisteringly clear twenty-twenty hindsight.

    In a town called Jungbao, a lot of people suddenly got sick. Really, really incredibly sick. Dying sick. There's all sorts of estimates. Jungbao is about the only place that people are starting to open up the mass graves to get a count. And what exactly happened might never be known. Currently, the best estimates I've found go like this:

    A lot of people got sick. The local medical boss, who was a WHO reporter, contacted Beijing with his estimate that H5N1 had become human to human transmissible and had, possibly, become more lethal. He wanted to report it to the WHO. He was told to hold the fuck on.

    Back then there were about a billion Chinese under a government that was still officially Communist (more like fascist but it's another essay) and pretty repressive. China, for a lot of reasons (another essay) tended to be where major illnesses first broke out. And the Chinese government found this embarassing.

    I know. The kids who grew up in this post-Plague chilly world think that I've got to be shitting. I'm not. The Chinese government was not up on telling the WHO that bird flu was now human transmissible and that a lot of people were dying of it in Jungbao.

    So what did they do? Well, as far as anyone can tell, they sent in the Army. It had orders to cordon off the area and prevent anyone from leaving. They also sent in, slowly, more doctors and ‘began official examination of the nature of the events in the Jungbao area.' That last is from a document found in one of the offices that the historians are starting to pick over. There's just so damned much and so few experts who speak Chinese to do it at this point that the record's barely starting to firm up. But that looks like what happened.

    Well, here's the thing. If you don't directly know what bird flu is like when you get it, you've got somebody who has told you the tale. If you don't know, you're a kid. (Sorry about the language. That's how soldiers are.) Probably it's been described to you by your mom or step-mom who freaks out totally when your fever goes up a single point.

    But these guys had never seen it. They sent in the Army, cordoned off the area, started rounding people up for examination. And the soldiers weren't vaccinated.

    Seems like a no-brainer, right? Well, the Chinese, individually, are smart as whips. Before the flu and maybe more since, those that are still alive. But their fucking government at the time? Serious fucking idiots.

    Call it denial. Most of the guys running the government were old. They didn't want to admit that bird flu was breaking out and things were going to change. They didn't want foreigners poking around in their country and examining the realities of Chinese peasant life. (Which sucked then and sucks more now.) They wanted things to stay the same.

    So they sent in the soldiers, who weren't vaccinated. And they got sick. And the survivors or the sick but mobile, started fleeing the area. Including some of the soldiers (maybe all of them, we're not sure).

    That was about the same time we got our warning order from the Chief of Staff.

    Now, things generally don't work really fast in the military. I mean, if it's a combat op, it goes really fast. But things like world-wide distribution of immunizations? I figured it would take a year.

    It wasn't all that long, but it was nearly three weeks before we got our shipment. By then, the WHO was on the scene in Western China and it was getting harder and harder for the Chinese government to cover up what was, and is, the biggest disease outbreak in the history of mankind. The news media still wasn't in the area but they were reporting second and third hand stories of mass deaths.

    And we mostly blew it off. Why? Because ‘if it bleeds, it leads.' The 24 hour news cycle had gotten so competitive that even the most minor thing in those days, say a tornado in Kansas, which is about as ‘irregular' as blowing your nose, suddenly became the first sign of the End of Civilization! ‘Tornado in Kansas! THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END!'

    Call it the ‘Cry Wolf' syndrome. You all know the fable. Well the news media had predicted so many ends of civilization they were about as well regarded in that area as a guy on a street corner holding a sign saying ‘The End Is Coming!' (Possibly a metaphor that won't work for the younger generation since, well, street people... Nuff said.)

    Having said that, they also sort of soft-peddled it. Basically, they were having a hard time believing the second and third hand reports. The only first hand really good sources were the WHO guys who were having a hard enough time surviving much less talking to the news media. And the WHO brass were... well, brass. Top officials don't say things like ‘Look, people, this is the fucking end, okay? Flee to the hills! I'm out of here, you can stay here and die if you want!'

    Honestly, the WHO might have had a chance if the Chinese had worked with them. Might. Maybe. Probably not but... Alternate histories.

    Anyway, the news media was getting reports of ‘thousands dead.' But they couldn't get camera crews into the area, or even guys with pencils and papers. People were streaming out of Western China but they had to avoid the roadblocks. Which meant they weren't exactly hunting up reporters; they were trying to stay away from the soldiers who were trying to stop them and get ahead of the plague. (Good luck on that one, sucker. NOBODY got ahead of the plague. We're only on one fucking planet.) A few of them went to reporters but when they said ‘everyone in my village is dead, thousands are dead...' Well, if you want to run a story like ‘thousands dead' you need one or two of a few things. You need someone you trust to eyeball it, like one of your own reporters. Or you need a government official to say it. If even the WHO had said it, people would have believed it. The WHO, though... Well, they were brass. They were getting sporadic reports from their hard-core and trustworthy guys that lots and lots and lots of people were dying.

    From one of the few reports the WHO has made public:

    ‘Entered village of Kai-Ching on 28^th. Village abandoned. No live personnel save myself and driver. In one hour period counted sixty three bodies in early stages of decomposition. Found one large grave, unable to assess contents in any reasonable time. Primary site, Pou-Chin, not allowed access.'

    And there's another thing. So there's one village that's got sixty-three dead people in it. That's bad, don't get me wrong. But... It's not thousands dead. And even looking at a map, getting more and more reports, a hundred here, fifty there... It was hard for anyone to truly comprehend and say ‘This is the Big One.' Actually, they were saying that, internally, but they didn't want to panic people.

    The US Government has their own people for assessing this stuff. CDC and the USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Infectious Investigations Department) are tied into the WHO like arteries are tied to veins. Many of the WHO respondents were US Government personnel. And they were reporting back to the US. (This is, by the way, one of the reasons that the Chinese didn't like WHO. Most of the respondents were government workers from one country or another and all were considered spies.) The US government was getting the same reports. But then you get to ‘what do we do about it?'

    And thus we get to President Warrick.

    Warrick, for all she was a micromanaging bitch, was like a lot of micromanagers. Making a firm decision and sticking with it was anathema. Thus the ‘I want to get out of Iran but can't figure out how.' Now she had people telling her that bird flu was coming and the world was coming to an end. It was only the beginnings of her problems but we all know that.

    Anyway, the DOD ordered immediate and required Type Two (fuck me, fuck me) immunizations. They had already stock-piled them. Logistics at the strategic level got suddenly very fucked up as they began using every plane in the inventory to move them to every detachment in the world. Priority parts? Forget it. Personnel? They wait. These were birds that had been blocked out months in advance and, thank God, suddenly every single block, EVERY SINGLE BLOCK became ‘serum distribution.'

    That is how to respond to a plague. The Chiefs of Staff ordered it, soft-peddling it to their idiotic bosses and to the media (because that was the party line) because they saw the writing on the wall and weren't idiots like me.

    President Warrick?

    ‘Under Executive Order 423 I am hereby ordering a distribution of vaccines to local health officials. These vaccines will be available to anyone who feels it necessary to get a bird flu shot. My advisors recommend them primarily for the elderly and the young.'

    I'm rubbing my temples in remembered anger. It is as fresh now as it was ten years ago. Every time I see that pinched face on TV I want to vomit. If I was writing this by hand, I wouldn't be able to. They're shaking too bad in a need to kill that bitch.

    Three sentences, all of them alike in totally absolute FUCKED UP'EDNESS!

    I will take them one at a time.

    ‘Under Executive Order 423 I am hereby ordering a distribution of vaccines to local health officials.'

    There were over three hundred million stockpiled doses of Type One and nearly a hundred million of Type Two. She specifically ordered Type Two to not be distributed because it had not completed human testing requirements.

    Okay, you can give it to the soldiers but not to civilians. Civilians can and will sue. Soldiers cannot. Civilians comprised most of her voting block. And a bunch of her voters, as became obvious, were bug-shit nuts. She wasn't going to tell them to take the better stuff. Better to just go with the known quantity.

    But that's not the real core of the fuckedupedness of this sentence. You see, what Executive Order 423 actually ordered was distribution to county health clinics. Only.

    The lady was a big believer in socialized medicine. I know, I know, laugh. We all know, now, that that was a death sentence. We know a lot of things. Twenty-twenty hind-sight. But she was a believer in it like the Pope believes in God. It was Right and it was Just and it was The Only Way.

    Under Executive Order 423... hang on... I'm sorry, the memories, the hatred, the deaths... Fuck. I just have to keep stopping.

    Where was I? Oh, first sentence.

    Under Executive Order 423 the doses were sent to county health officials. Only.

    Effectively, going back to the bottle of water thing, she did what I would have done if I was a complete and total fucking idiot. The Federal Government had a list of the address of every county health office in the country and a fair guess of how many people they potentially served. That is, if there were ninety thousand people in the county and one health office (common in those days) then they were good for ninety thousand of the total population of the US.

    They then gave each office sort of a percentage and sent out THE WHOLE STOCKPILE OF VACCINE.

    Well, not every bit. They kept a bit back, something like twenty million doses. Not that it helped in the long run. I think I read somewhere that they actually all went bad when Milwaukee had one of their long blackouts and the refrigerators shut down.

 

---

 

    Let's make this perfectly clear. Then and even now most people could not tell you where their county health clinic is. Or if there's more than one. When people got sick, they went to their personal physician. Ditto immunizations and such. If they couldn't get an appointment they went to a Doc-In-The-Box. If it was bad, they went to the hospital. Not much has changed.

    County Health offices did some reporting and mostly helped out the poor. The people working in them were, by and large, there because it was easy work, steady if low pay and there was a small amount of ego gratification. (And for some petty power.) Thus the workers, the management, the whole structure tended to be one that was, shall we say, less than suited to crisis management. They went to the seminars and had classes and all the rest. But these were pencil pushers and stampers and people that gave a few shots a month. They were the health equivalent of Fobbits.

    They weren't bad people. Don't get me wrong. They were, by and large, good people. Probably better morally than me.

    They were the WRONG fucking people to expect to respond heroically to a plague.

    These offices, which had limited cold storage space, were suddenly INUNDATED with boxes of serum that HAD to be refrigerated. And because the news media had been beating the drum of BIRD FLU they were, AT THE SAME TIME inundated with customers. At that point you got down to individual reactions. They were as diverse as the county health administrators. All I can do is give three examples. These are not "worst to best" in a grand sense, simply cases I've researched and categorized myself.

    Worst: Orange County, California/LA, CA. I choose this as the classic example of utter fucking stupidity but compounded by sheer volume.

    Now, without any real warning they received, at their central warehouse, nearly sixteen million doses. They had cold storage for a bare million. The response of the county health manager (who's name I will not write. Ever.) was to have a meeting. While the doses that were not in cold storage sat in a trailer in hundred degree heat. They had been unloaded from reefers (refrigerated trailers) and placed in the only available storage, outside "CONEX" shipping containers. Unrefrigerated.

    According to the minutes of the meeting, this was brought up, repeatedly, by the warehouse manager. The term ‘heated' and ‘raised voices' was used in the minutes.

    The meeting went on for over six hours. No resolution was found. It didn't really matter. By the time adults stepped in, all the doses were useless.

    They were useless. The DNA chains they depended upon to do their work were destroyed by heat in less than the six hours it took to have the meeting. By the time a decision was made (days later) by the Governor of California, it was so far too late it was insane.

    There were, however, one million remaining doses. They were then rationed to those who ‘truly needed them.' This included everyone in county government down to trash collectors. (Although those guys earned their doses later. Those that didn't desert.) And, of course, the head of county health.

    There went fifteen million doses of serum.

    Intermediate: St. Louis, MO.

    Six million doses. Storage for three hundred thousand.

    Upon receiving the shipment, the warehouse manager took one look at it and ordered the trucker to drop the reefer. When the trucker refused (it was a leased reefer) the manager explained that what was on there was vital medicines, they did not have storage and that if necessary he would have a cop shoot the trucker if he tried to drive away with the reefer.

    (This was in a deposition, witness the truck driver, Morell Hermon, who asked for and received one of the shots while he was there. He stated that at the time he was angry at the decision because it caused him some personal grief and economic hardship, but wanted to thank the warehouse manager for being so farsighted. Alas, his boss was less so.)

    Thus the six million doses were saved for the nonce.

    The head of county health, however, chose to obey the letter of the Executive Order (big essay possible on constitutional issues there but we've had talking heads on that one for so many years I'm sick of it) and set up a distribution network for the County Health Branch offices. Would have been a decent one. If they hadn't gotten fucking swamped. Emergency services got their own distribution (more or less by walking in and saying ‘Give us vaccine. Now.' at the warehouse), got the shots spread around to all emergency service personnel (and in some cases friends and family members according to more depositions) and eventually started raiding the warehouse to set up shot centers at firehouses, police stations, etc. They even hit a few schools before the Plague hit.

    The county health centers?

    There were only a few real riots. A riot being defined as ten or more people in a mass fight. Only one that really could call itself a riot when the Springfield Street county health office was burned to the ground. Total of six deaths. None of them healthworkers, by the way. They were evacuated by the police when the situation went critical.

    Figure six people in an office. There were nine offices. The population was over five million. Worse, they played by the letter of the law in distribution. Only one or two of them were ‘qualified' to give immunizations.

    The lines were...astronomical. Truly ludicrous. People camping out for days. They still were when the Plague hit (also when the riots started) and the conditions were ripe for spread. The very people most determined to get vaccinated... were some of the first to get infected.

    Total distribution in the county? 138, 000 doses. Some 60% by emergency services personnel who were not authorized to do so. Population? 5.2 million. Deaths? Who knows. Estimates are 2.8.

    It's times like these that I'm glad granpappy taught me how to make a still and the real use in the world for potatoes.

    You'll notice I didn't mention deaths in LA. That's because, really, nobody knows. As of last census there is a population in Orange County, CA of five hundred thousand, mostly centered around the harbor area, Long Beach and Malibu. But H5N1, bad as it is, does NOT kill 90% of the population. Where are the rest of the former inhabitants? Well, there was significant death rates due to the Freeze (Californians were NOT prepared for the winters) and people just moved. Fled in the first wave of the Plague, moved out to try to find better climes (or better support structure) at the Freeze... One of the census questions that was part of a statistical sample was ‘Were you a resident of your current living area prior to the events starting in 2019?' Nationwide the average was 82% ‘Yes.' In LA County the average is 63% ‘No.' LA County, effectively, depopulated and has been slowly filling back up. Hell, the weather there is still better than Blue Earth, trust me. If I thought it was fucking cold in Minnesota growing up...

    But I digress.

    Best:

    Everybody knows the answer: The Big Apple.

    Damn if a Democrat Mayor didn't hit it right on the fucking nosey. Admittedly, he had the example of Guliani on 9/11. But he did what was right and damn the consequences.

    Most people know the story but I'll tell it for those who are interested in my take or who have just terminally been out of the loop. (I've got a couple of friends who have just come out of hiding. There may be more.)

    Upon receipt of the vaccines, the central distribution manager did the same thing as St. Louis. "Oh, no, you are NOT fucking taking the reefers away."

    Peripheral note. The reefers were coming from the manufacturer, Winslow Pharmaceuticals, who was being paid to handle the distribution by the Federal Government. They'd also been paid to do the long-term stockpiling. Some people might have been following the investigations and trials surrounding the distribution. My take. The Feds paid Winslow to pay truckers using temporary rented reefers to distribute the vaccine. Winslow followed their directives because that was what it was directed to do and was being paid to do. One of the Winslow logistics guys is on record (email exchange with Surgeon General's office) protesting the use of temporary reefers for the very reason of what happened in LA. But that's what they were told and paid to do. Trying the CEO, etc, of Winslow was criminal in itself. The fact that no Federal officials were tried makes it worse. The fuck-up was at the Fed level, not Winslow.

    County health looked at the Executive Order and started to do what was ordered: distribute only to county health offices. Mayor Cranslow stepped in and said ‘Not only no, but HELL no.' His exact words from the minutes of the meeting were: "Just because you are told to commit suicide doesn't mean you have to stick the pistol in your mouth and pull the damned trigger."

    Within two days, a distribution system was set up (under a former Army S-4 proving that all S-4s are not lame-brain dickbreaths). Each hospital, county health office, physicians office (to include Doc-In-The-Boxes and even psychiatrists and plastic surgeons) and hospital was given an initial supply, amounting to forty percent of the on-hand at the warehouse and based on their best estimate of initial requests. Every emergency service person was vaccinated and called in on mandatory overtime.

    During this time there were repeated emergency broadcasts. A replication of one:

    "There is a high probability that the New York area will soon experience cases of the Asian Bird Flu. Two times out of three, this disease will kill you. In no more than (started at three days) a distribution system will be in place so that everyone in the New York area can be vaccinated. If you do not get vaccinated, you have a two in three chance of dying. Even the stupidest gambler doesn't go for those odds. Do not try to get it now. Your city government is working as fast as it can to get the doses ready. When we're ready, it will be available at all county health offices as well as hospitals, fire stations and even your personal physician. Don't rush, there is still time. But get the shot. This has been Mayor Bill Cranslow. You pay me to make sure you stay alive. Let's both work on that."

    In two days the system was in place. Then New Yorkers were told to get the shot and not panic.

    Get the shot. Do not panic. There are no cases in the US yet. But get the shot. And do not panic.

    Get the shot. Do not panic.

    Over and over again. Along with "let's work together on that."

    And it worked. Everywhere there was a rush the first day. But the shots were everywhere and cops, firemen, meter maids, garbage collectors, were standing by to distribute more as stocks dwindled. The biggest bottleneck was syringes and peripherals. Syringe disposal boxes ran out the first day and never really caught up. New Yorkers reacted, adapted and overcame. They made them out of red spray-painted Tupperware containers. (Well, plastic sealing containers.) New Yorkers took time off from work to go to their firestation. They went to their physician's offices. They went to hospitals.

    Health care workers were overworked and often frustrated, but they dealt. And the broadcasts continued.

    Schools. The H5N1 could be administered either with a syringe or with the less common air-gun. Pupils in schools were lined up and given their injections, airgun, mass production style by order of the mayor. There were some protests and threats of law-suits. I'm not sure what happened with most of those. I suspect a lot of the protesting parents didn't get the shots themselves. For reasons that will become clear, later, there were and are a tremendous number of orphans in our great country. If you haven't taken one in, look up your local government foster care system and sign up. It's a lot easier these days than before the Plague and there are a hell of a lot more needy children. We've got four. What have you done for the world today?

    Within two weeks the crush was over. Every New Yorker that was going to get immunized did get immunized. And they had spares. Not enough to help places like fucking LA, but they had spares.

    Mayor Cranslow, by the way, was reelected last year in a true landslide. His campaign slogan? "Let's work together." The bastard makes me question being a Republican sometimes. If, when, he runs for President he's got my vote. I'll work together with him by fucking God.

    But let's get back to the Executive Order.

    ‘These vaccines will be available to anyone who feels it necessary to get a bird flu shot.'

    Okay, here we go into some tedious but necessary shit. Spread prevention games theory.

    The basic premise of infectious disease spread prevention is sort of like a game of Go.

    I need to explain Go, don't I?

    Sigh.

    In Go, which might just be the oldest board game in the world, each player gets a bunch of rocks, colored black one one side and white on the other, and plays them on a board filled with indentations or squares. If there is a black rock on a square and a white rock on either side of the square, the black rock becomes white and vice versa and so on. Basically, you try to surround your opponent.

    Spread prevention works the same way. Say that a person has the flu and they only see two other people a day, say in an office. (I know, impossible, but work with me here.) The infected person is the black rock. They can only infect the other two people around them. If both of them are immunized (and the immunization is good) and they wash their hands and... Look, work with me. If they can't get the flu, they can't pass it on. So whether the person who's infected lives or dies, it stops with him.

    That's the critically important thing to mass immunization. You have to create enough white rocks that the black rocks can't flip them. They can't get past them to uninfected portions of the populace. The problem being, hardly anybody ever deals with only two people all the time. Think about your day. You deal with hundreds of people every day. Or at least dozens. And they deal with dozens and they deal with dozens.

    That, as any school kid these days knows, is how disease spreads. To stop it, you have to cut off it's ability to infect. If you find a ‘patient zero' fast enough, or a location zero at least, you can try to encircle it, what's called ‘ring immunization.' Which was, sort of, what the Chinese tried. They just did it very badly.

    Now, don't get me wrong, there were a lot of people (obviously from the above) who wanted to get immunized. Maybe, if the distribution hadn't been so cocked up, enough to stop the spread.

    But probably not. Look, it's a complicated computer model but to stop a major spread you have to have 93% of a population (statistical) immunized. 93%. You can't get 93% of any population to decide on the color of the sky. The only way to truly stop a disease, butt cold, is mass, forced immunization. You've got to hit everybody you can get your stinking hands on if it means breaking down doors.

    Let's take a look at our ‘optimum' example, NYC. NYC, good as it was, did not, not NOT act as a white rock. Why?

    Illegal aliens, homeless, the criminal class, idiotic nature-loving vegans (sorry, highly redundant there), big-shot lawyers and stock brokers who ‘didn't have the time for this crap...' None of them got immunized. And because flu doesn't actually have to infect someone to get passed (it can get passed through handshakes even if the person with it on their hands doesn't get it) you'd be surprised how fast a big-time lawyer can get it from a street-person. Street person to drug dealer, drug dealer to drug dealer's boss, boss to his lawyer. Doesn't have to be on their hands, can be on cash. Put in a waiter in the middle if it makes you feel better.

    Robust airborne spread diseases are slippery fuckers. They will get your ass if there's not that 93% of ‘white rocks' around you.

    Fortunately, with the exception of illegal aliens the people in NYC who didn't get immunized are, sorry and being as callous as fuck, not worth the immunization. If you were too stupid to get it, stock-brokers and lawyers, you're better off out of this world. Criminals that were afraid they'd be arrested if they went to county health? Lessee, five days for violation of a restraining order or death. Hmmm... Homeless? There was even a program to go around offering it to them in their "habitual areas." Mostly by firefighters and cops which might have put some of them off. Hardly any got the shot. Why? Most homeless had mental health problems. (For you youngsters that grew up in the Post-Plague world they're what are called, again, bums.) There used to be a shit-pot full of them. I mean, like, dozens on any street in any major city. Hundreds of thousand of them. Most were too wacked to understand or believe about the flu. It was all a government plot. More alien mind control rays. Whatever.

    Most of them died. World ends at six. Poorest hardest hit. Go figure.

    And, sorry, given all the rest that died that tried, intelligently and aggressively, to live don't got much for the homeless and the rest of those idiots. There's a reason I live in Blue Earth again. All the planning in the world doesn't help if you're not allowed to have the medicine that will save your life. The homeless in NYC, and the rest that decided ‘I don't trust it', ‘I don't have the time'... Got nothing fucking for them. Got nothing.

    So there we have the stupidity of sentence two. If you're not going to mass immunize, you're not going to stop a disease. It worked with smallpox and polio. It might have worked with a bunch of other diseases, but we got weak. There's a program in the works right now to get started on slamming the door on everything possible, that is everything that transmits only through humans and domesticated animals. Don't know if it will ever work but it's worth a shot.

    So, Warrick you pinch faced lying incompetent bitch, let's take a look at sentence three.

    ‘My advisors recommend them primarily for the elderly and the young.'

    What advisors? Her advisors for a situation like this were the National Science Director, the Director of the National Institute for Health (NIH), the Surgeon General, the Director of the Center for Disease Control and the Commander of USAMRIID.

    All five have testified under oath at this point about the decision process, such as it was, leading to 423. Two, the National Science Director and the Surgeon General, took the Fifth. Fuckers. The other three, including the only two epidemiologists consulted, have, however, spoken at length.

    The first meeting was called by the National Science Director and included, along with various hangers on, the Director of the CDC, the NSD, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the SG. At that meeting, the President announced that the vaccine was to be distributed immediately and that it should be available through county health services. And that it should be given to the young and old first.

    Note: This was before any input from the advisors. This according to both the DCDC and the Secretary of Homeland Security.

    The DCDC has stated that he demurred after it was clear that neither the NSD or the SG were going to. Why?

    First, there was a plan already set up for vaccine distribution. Called, incredibly, the Emergency Vaccine Distribution Plan (incredibly because it actually made sense) it had been in place for years and regularly updated. It was a complicated distro but, effectively, it spread the vaccine through both military and emergency civilian channels to all healthcare providers. There were identification methods. Following initial distribution there was a forced immunization program as a sub-codicil noboby wanted to really use.   It was cumbersome. Everyone knew it was cumbersone and that it would take at least a week to get the vaccine down to civilians. But it was designed to work. Might not have, but it was the Plan.

    In the first three minutes of the meeting, the Prez had thrown the Plan right out the window. So much of sentence one and two. This is really about sentence three.

    Bird Flu was strange. Most flus, the major deaths occurred in the old and the young. And, don't get me wrong, the bird flu killed off both groups.

    But like the earlier Spanish Flu, bird flu was not a secondary killer, it was a primary. Secondary and primary... Sigh.

    Most flus don't kill you. They just get you very sick and, notably, flood your lungs with fluids. Secondary viral and bacterial infections then get in those fluids and kill some people through pneumonia. Notably...the old and the young. Thus, the deaths are from secondary infections. Secondary killers.

    There are very rare flus, though, which are primary killers. Death qua death, the Grim Reaper, Pushin' Up Daisies, occurs because specific portions of the brain (we don't need all of our brains, just ask Al Gore) die. There are various ways that those portions can die, anything that cuts of oxygen to them for long enough will do it. (Such as, say, having your head cut off.) But something has to kill them.

    Besides all the usual stuff that bird flu did, it spread systemically. It mostly got in the lungs and caused pneumonia. But even if you survived that, it tended to hang on. If your immune system couldn't kill it, it got into the brain. And then, well, you quickly went mad and then died. Thus the pattern of get sick, seem to recover, relapse, die.

    Worse, like the Spanish Flu and for reasons that are still being studied, it hit the ‘prime' population harder. That is, the young and old tended to get the pneumonia but if they shook that off (which if there was health care was normally possible with antibiotics) they survived.

    People in ‘prime ages' went through all that, (if they didn't die of pneumonia) felt better for a couple of days, relapsed and then died.

    Mortality amongst prime population, 15-55, was twenty percent higher than among peripheral population, the young and the old.

    So, let's see, in that one meeting the Prez ignored the Plan and chose the wrong group to focus on immunizing.

    Don't get me wrong. I care for all living beings except slow drivers in the left-hand lane, terrorists and pedophiles. And I'd have loved to be able to save all those youngsters and old folks. Well... Sort of. The youngsters, certainly.

    Face facts. I loved my dad and he wasn't even in the ‘old' category. But old people, retired people that wander around playing shuffle-board...

    We were looking at surviving. Not prospering. Not becoming better. Surviving. The advisors knew how lethal H5N1 was. Destroy a certain percentage of any society and it crumbles. The models based on wars and previous famines and pestilence was twenty percent. At that point, the society devolves to survival level. (At least that was the model. We found out how robust some societies were and how weak others. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

    But of that twenty percent, old people don't matter. They're done. Even if they have the desire to rebuild, they don't have the strength or stamina. They're smart, they're wise, sure. (The good ones.) But they can't rebuild a society. They're the past. If you have to sacrifice any group in a survival situation, The. Old. Go. First. Cold survival logic is like that. Not nice, but survival logic isn't.

    Sigh. ‘Women and children first' would have been the right call. Why? Because they matter. Children are the future of any society. Immunize the kids first? Hell, yeah. Forget that they're less susceptible. They're going to take care of the survivors in the survivor's old age. If they make it.

    Children are important.

    But...

    Kids can't rebuild a society. I don't care what you've seen or read in a science fiction story, they just can't. They don't have the experience, they don't, yet, have the strength that is going to be needed. Most of them would, eventually, become of reproductive age. If they survived.

    Look, mortality from H5N1 dropped with age to about seven then picked up again. Say that it was even more lethal than it was and killed off everyone in the middle.

    You'd have a planet filled with oldsters and children.

    Think they're going to get factories going again? That they can run farms?

    Think again.

    You'd better have that functional middle or the kids are going to starve and the oldsters are going to starve and die off and nobody's going to remember or care what the fuck the Mona Lisa was or why she was smiling like that. Kids growing up scavenging in the ruins. Read A Boy and His Dog. But don't believe the end; there's nothing a teenage boy won't do for pussy.

    Women? I'm just a sexist, right?

    Not if you're looking at survival. Look, it's logic most people don't like but here it is:

    Once upon a time the whole human population of the world got wiped out except about forty-four reproductive aged females. (Big volcanic explosion called Tubu. Look it up.) How many males doesn't matter. As long as there was one, we're good. He'd be busy but we're good. Nobody knows or cares how many males were in that group that eventually grew to six billion and change. All that mattered were forty-four females.

    Sad but true, women have babies. Males have more utility than just sperm, don't get me wrong. But when you're talking about something as tight as bird flu, women matter much more. ‘Reproductive age' women.

 

---

 

    Everything that Warrick was, though, prevented her from even thinking about that. Warrick was the ball-buster's ball-buster. I am woman hear me roar. You'd think she'd have made sure the immunizations went to women first for that very reason, but she couldn't even survive that logic.

    The worst part, the absolute worst part, was that even if the distro had worked it was going to be going to one group that wasn't going to be of use in the immediate aftermath and a group that wasn't of any true functionality at all.

    So the Director of the CDC demurred. He was about the only male in the room, so he was ignored. So he pointed out that there were others that were missing from the meeting. Notably, the Commander of USAMRIID and NIH, both of whom were missing.

    Another meeting was called. Both USAMRIID and NIH were in the more or less DC area so it assembled that evening. The second meeting, according to testimony from the DCDC, CUSAMRIID and the DNIH (three males in a meeting chaired by and filled with female ball-busters) was ‘acrimonious.' Neither the National Science Director (a former professor of environmental science) nor the Surgeon General (an MD specializing in ‘women's historical medicine' whatever the fuck that means) would disagree with the three actual, you know, specialists in fighting plagues. On the other hand, they also did not support them. And the President, from her vast store of experience trying to take the medical industry apart like a chicken, Knew that children and old farts were the Most Vulnerable and Had To Be Protected.

    Well, yeah, gee. Nice sentiment. The only problem being that we weren't dealing with the common fucking COLD lady!

    She also didn't listen to reason on the subject of the other two sentences. Go figure. Men had testicles and therefore were Wrong.

    Just before WWI started the Kaiser sent a message to the King of England, who was some sort of cousin, saying something like ‘War is now inevitable.' He was still bargaining, but from the POV of ‘we're going to kick your ass unless you surrender now.' But that's not really the point.

    The point is, as of the end of that second meeting, a biological disaster in the US was inevitable.

    Most people in the US don't realize how important getting the right President is. Sure, the Prez gets blamed for a lot of things that he or she can't control. The Prez does not control the Stock Market or the Federal Reserve. But the reality is that the Founding Fathers, having no real previous experience of democracy or a republic and having lived under a monarchy their whole fucking lives, created a temporary king to run the country. They were, at heart, monarchists. They just didn't like the current one and didn't want to make it hereditary. (Don't get me started on Bush, Warrick, Bush, Warrick. But from history it's a very bad sign.)

    So every four years we elect a king. Since people like consistency, we tend to elect the same king as many times as we can get away with. (See previous paragraph.) And the king, especially in any sort of emergency, has a lot of power. They don't always, or even most of the time, have enough to fix things right away. But they've got a lot of power.

    Including the power to totally screw things up.

    Everybody in the room that had the power to change the President's idea of a fucking plan also worked for the bitch. Legally, they were required to follow her orders. They could argue, they could recommend but that was like talking to the Great Wall of China. She knew what was Right and what was Good and the people arguing against her had Dicks and they were Wrong.

    For the kids reading this, this is a very important point. When you choose your king, forget most of the reasons you think you should vote for the king. Mostly, the king can't do much about the economy but ruin it. They can't make you richer or smarter (although they can manage the reverse.) If you want one suggestion, think about all the contingencies under which that king (or queen in this case) may hold your lives in his or her hands. And choose wisely. About half the US population chose unwisely. (48.2%. It was one of those elections.)

    Quite a few of them died. Every person who voted for Warrick deserved it.