Once upon a time the whole human population of the world got wiped out except about forty-four reproductive aged females. (Based on DNA data. 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 Advisor (a former patent lawyer) 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 U.S. was inevitable.
Most people in the U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
Chapter Four
They Always Forget the Emergency
Patient Zero, USA, was in Chicago. What the fuck?
Definitions. Patient Zero. The first detected case of a disease. Generally, that required lots of investigation as the disease was tracked back.
In this case, Ching Mao Pong was easy to find. Just follow the screaming.
But Chicago? What the fuck?
Most of the epidemiologists who were scattering out to try to stop things had headed for the West Coast. Why? Most immigration and movement from China came from that direction. And it wasn't just China anymore. H5N1 was breaking out all over Southeast Asia. Some of it being spread by bird movement but more from people movement. The Chinese had little tendrils all over Asia and people were following those tendrils trying to escape the Plague.
Outside of China the first reports, by a few minutes, were from Thailand. Then, within a day, every single country in Southeast Asia except Vietnam (which right up until it turned into a wasteland didn't admit any cases) reported cases.
All of them tried containment. But it was impossible to contain. None of them had the sort of health system that the U.S. did, they were physically connected to China, they had birds migrating from China that carried the Plague, none of which we had, and we couldn't contain it. (Maybe we could have. If, possibly. If wishes were fishes . . . )
There was the Plan. Called the Epidemiological Emergency Response Plan (with the unfortunate acronym EERP, which sounds like someone who has just had a very bad practical joke played on them); it had several parts. It probably wouldn't have worked because what every Emergency Plan leaves out is the fucking emergency.
Example: Hurricane Katrina. Okay, okay, most of the shit about it was urban legend. There were not tens of thousands of dead. There were no riots or rapes in the Superdome and people were neither starving nor "out of water." They were being rationed, which the fuckers that were complaining thought was starving, but that's not the same thing. But let's look at the evacuation Plan.
Okay, Nagin was a total fuck-up and never even tried to initiate it. He'd never looked at it, despite a fucking hurricane being headed for his city which, by the way, was below sea level. So calling him a fuck-up is insulting fuck-ups. But there was a Plan.
The Plan was to use school and city buses to evacuate all those who were "transportation challenged." Whether Nagin used it or not was sort of a moot point, though. People had forgotten little details. Such as, there was no emergency call list for the drivers.