A little more digging and I discovered that on the third weekend in January the International Epidemiological Conference held its winter meeting in London and that the attendees to the winter meeting mapped really well with which university towns had the highest rates of infection. The irony of a meeting of epidemiologists being ground zero for a highly virulent new form of flu was not lost on me, or anyone else, for that matter, once the news got out.
Thomas Stevenson, former Director, National Security Agency:
When it became clear to us that the IEC winter meeting had been the likely ground zero for what we’d eventually call Haden’s syndrome, we naturally began to research, within the confines of the law and always with the highest possible standard of transparency, the attendees of the winter meeting, including their recent research. We wanted to find out who might have been working on research in line with what we were seeing with the new virus. We were naturally concerned that the virus might not have occurred naturally, and that it had been designed as a potential weapon.
Was there ever a determination?
Neither we nor any other US government agency were able to officially determine the initial source of the Haden’s virus, nor were we able to determine whether the virus was naturally occurring or had been genetically designed.
What about unofficially?
Quite obviously I can’t comment on any unofficial findings.
Irving Bennett:
I know of two rumors that are given the most credence in the world of Haden’s historians. The first is that after the First Lady came down with the disease that would eventually be named for her, a factory outside of Miranshah was airbombed into rubble. Officially the factory made cold medicines. I suppose you can guess what the unofficial suspicion was. The Times stringers in the area confirmed the place had been turned to rubble but neither the Pakistani nor the US government confirmed an airstrike. The official cause for the factory going up was “inter-tribal conflicts.” Presumably one tribal chieftain ordered a truck filled with explosives to drive up to a loading dock and then detonate. There was a Pashtun epidemiologist at the IEC, although he was never charged with anything.
The second rumor involves a Swiss biology graduate student who had a bad breakup with his lover, a grad student in epidemiology, and also access to viral material and a gene synthesizer. Whether this dumb bastard intended for his new bug to get out into the general population is up for debate. This is a rumor because there’s no hard evidence that the presumed creator of the virus did the deed, and we can’t ask him because shortly after the first fatalities associated with the virus started cropping up, he took a rifle and shot the back of his head out with it. His former lover, incidentally, was fine. Never even got sick.
Both of these rumors are reasonably plausible but for practical purposes they both can’t be true, so which of these two rumors you find more compelling is a personality test, in a way.
Natasha Lawrence:
It was clear this wasn’t the H5N1 variant so we started breaking it down to see what we had. What we had was a virus that had a widely variable but long incubation period—that’s the time between when you get the virus and when you start showing symptoms—but a short latency period, meaning the time between when you catch the virus and can start spreading it to other people. Long incubation plus short latency means there’s a fairly large window for subclinical infection—people infecting each other before they feel sick themselves.
So that’s what happened here. The Haden’s virus is transmissible by air, which makes it easy to catch. By the time the International Epidemiological Conference winter meeting had adjourned, roughly eighty percent of the thousand or so attendees had been infected. They had been in close contact and breathing in each other’s air the entire three days. And then when they dispersed they traveled back to several hundred points of origin on six separate continents, traveling in airplanes packed with other people. From a virus’ point of view, you couldn’t have asked for a more optimal transmission pattern.
Now, that’s optimal for the virus. It’s not optimal for us. When it came to the Haden’s virus, by the time we knew what we were dealing with, we also knew that it had potentially already spread to millions and possibly billions of people. What we didn’t know was how serious this new virus would be. We had half of New York throwing up in ER rooms, but we didn’t know how long it would take for the virus to resolve itself, and for the body’s own systems to beat it.
We did know we didn’t have a vaccine. The Haden’s virus initially presented like an influenza virus, but when we started looking at it we realized we really were looking at something new, so the sort of antivirals we use for flu—the neuraminidase and M2 inhibitors—weren’t necessarily going to have the same effect on Haden’s.
So no matter what, we were in for a rough time.
Monique Davis:
The first phase of Haden’s looked like flu and acted like flu, but it was the worst flu we’d seen. Lots of vomiting. Lots of respiratory congestion. Fevers as people’s immune responses kicked into overdrive trying to kill the virus from the inside. We treated what we could treat but after Super Bowl Sunday we knew we were up against something different.
People started to die. Old people, people with weakened immune systems. Then infants, which was heartbreaking. Those were the most vulnerable populations with any influenza infection, however, so no matter how heartbreaking, it was still understandable and to some extent expected. But then otherwise healthy people started dying as the Haden’s virus just overwhelmed their systems. One kid came into the ER complaining that being sick was messing with his training for the Mohawk marathon in Albany, which was going to be run a couple of weeks later. He was dead by morning.
That was the frustrating thing about Haden’s. Outside the usual at-risk groups for opportunistic viral infections there wasn’t any rhyme or reason to who got sick, who got better and who didn’t. It was like flipping a coin. Heads, you were sick for a day or two and then you were fine. Tails, you were laid up in the hospital for a week. Or you were dead.
About a week into it everyone stopped calling it the “Super Bowl Flu” and started calling it “The Great Flu,” because it was something that just wasn’t stopping. It was like the Spanish Flu in the early 20th Century, except so much faster and so much more.
Benjamin Moldanado:
The parallel with the flu pandemic of 1918-20 was obvious but it’s also inadequate. The Spanish Flu took two years to circle the globe because transportation was slow, and the outbreak happened at a time when the global population was under two billion. There were more than seven billion people on the planet when Haden’s hit, in an era when you can get from one side of the planet to the other in less than a day. The spread of Haden’s was exponentially faster and affected an exponentially larger number of people.
We did have better understanding of disease and a more coordinated global response working for us, but unfortunately given the specific nature of how the Haden’s virus transmitted, those came into play only after the virus had already spread itself across the planet.