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 U.S. 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 the supply of 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-painted bleach bottles. New Yorkers took time off from work to go to their fire station. 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 lawsuits. 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 L.A., 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 Othello.
I need to explain Othello, don't I?
Sigh.
In Othello each player gets a bunch of rocks, colored black on 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 its 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 stockbrokers 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 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, stockbrokers 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 thousands of them. Most were too whacked 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.