Zombie Outbreak FAQs #1

A Story by D Allen

Its time to answer a few FAQs about zombie outbreak survival. It's my hope this will all help you survive.

This is the next informational story in my extended zombie outbreak survival series aiming to increase public preparedness for an eventual zombie outbreak and the ensuing pandemonium that will follow. It’s time I shared a little more information about me and began listing some FAQs about Z-virus outbreak survival. Some of these FAQs will relate very closely to other information I shared so far in previous articles. The next stories I post here will cover additional FAQs.

About Me: I retired from the US Marines after 21 years of active duty service. I served in several international actions and incidents involving peace-keeping and combat, including several special squads and details. I enlisted in 1984 as a private and I retired in 2005 as a Captain. I have two Masters Degrees; one in Psychology and the other in Biology. I am certified to teach urban warfare tactics, desert and jungle survival, and counterterrorism (and a few other things like Mathematics, Physics, Biology, combat swimming, and self defense, to name a few). My dream job would be either head football coach or lead criminal investigator.

FAQs:

Q: Is there a way for terrorists to start a zombie outbreak?

A: Yes. However, outbreak models rigorously studied by Texas A&M show artificial Z-virus outbreaks sparked by acts of terrorism would tend to be short-lived. The highest potential for a full blown zombie apocalypse exists best when the Z-virus outbreak piggy-backs off of some other pandemic outbreak. A naturally occurring Z-virus outbreak requires large numbers of dead, intact, and unattended bodies.

While a terrorist with a synthesized Z-virus is scary enough to imagine, such zombie outbreaks are actually quite easy to contain and control. Germans experimented with controlled outbreaks in WWII and they found them to be completely unreliable and unlikely to produce desired results because of the difficulty in controlling the rate of the outbreak beyond the initial incident. There are Japanese outbreak models that suggest an artificial outbreak is very possible when it is combined with other terrorist acts such as disabling a major power grid, or when it is combined with a pandemic outbreak or some other natural disaster, but again such outbreaks are relatively easy to contain compared to a natural outbreak.

Q: You said there are vaccines for Z-virus, so why doesn’t the government vaccinate everyone now before the apocalypse?

A: There is a vaccine for Z-virus. It’s given to key government workers such as scientists, lab workers, key health officials, CDC agents, federal agents, and the military as a proactive preventive measure. The trick with the vaccines that have been developed is that the FDA approved Z-virus vaccine kills about 10% of all the people who get it. Because the mortality rate for the vaccine is so high, it cannot be authorized for wide public use unless there is an active outbreak. Imagine if 10% of the people who got the flu vaccine died from it"we’d never roll the dice on that vaccine publicly.

Once there is an outbreak, the Z-virus vaccine can and will be provided to anyone who is not already infected, but who is also highly likely to be exposed. People around the center of an outbreak ground zero can be force-vaccinated according to some containment protocols. Contrary to what you see in some zombie movies, once you contract Z-virus there is no cure. You will either die and become a zombie or you will not die because you have some inherent personal immunity to the virus. About 1 in 100,000 people have a natural immunity"if a zombie bites them, it would just be for practice; although, zombie bites themselves can become infected with other things and can also prove to be deadly if say a zombie bites someone in a major blood vein.

There is also another problem with the vaccine beyond the 10% death rate. The vaccine also has a 5% zombification rate, where 5% of all who get the vaccine will turn into an infectious zombie. When people are proactively given the vaccine, they are quarantined in or near a medical facility for several days to keep an eye out for "bad reactions" to the vaccine. The Z-virus vaccine must also be administered in 6 steps over a 2 month period (6 individual shots). Military members serving in the late 90s were given what was called the anthrax series of vaccinations. The Z-virus vaccine was secretly combined with this vaccine series to great success as many service members suspected. You can Google military anthrax vaccine deaths and see plenty of stories about these trials plus some true accounts of soldiers becoming zombies after getting vaccinated. I say the trials were successful because now there is a significant and growing number of people in the general population with immunities to the Z-virus. People like me.

The vaccine shows a 90% survival rate for those who get the full six shots. The first shot improves survival by just 10% and the subsequent shots improve survival further. For those of us who are fully vaccinated, if we are somehow later exposed to Z-virus it will feel like the worst flu we ever got. Barring any other medical conditions of relevance, we will fully recover in a few weeks. For those with natural immunity, exposure to Z-virus gives them only a case of the sniffles. This is why the Z-virus vaccine is a tough sell. Plus there are a whole lot of people who just flat out refuse to believe a zombie outbreak is even possible. Given there is a 15% chance that something bad will happen to you if you get the Z-virus vaccine series, would you voluntarily take it? Military members in the late 90s didn’t have a choice in the matter. People in the immediate vicinity of an outbreak ground zero won’t have a choice either.

In the next story I post here in the Café I'll continue to cover more FAQs. Stay tuned, your survival depends on it.