It's Nobody's Fault

A Chapter by garside

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the

Formerly United States of America,

and to the republic for which it once stood.

One nation, completely divided, but once again

with liberty and justice for all.

Being an infectious disease specialist with a focus in epidemic viruses, you'd think I'd have been super pleased that the world ended up collapsing from an viral epidemic. I mean, come on. That's like being the right fielder who never gets anything making a triple play at the bottom of the 9th, bases loaded, all tied up. Well, I guess in this case, the outfielder dropped the ball.

I'm not going to assume a lot of responsibility though. Primarily because it literally wasn't my fault that polio spread so quickly; I've got an immunity to it, so I didn't help spread it at all. Secondarily because it literally wasn't anyone's field. Do you have any idea just how many communicable diseases there are? Polio was cured as far as we knew. It wasn't even taught in schools anymore. We had more pressing issues to be dealing with at the time.

Here's the "shitlist" that kept my department busy. I've indicated with a star (*) all of the diseases which have a more painful death than polio, a double star (**) which are at least twice as bad as those diseases with a star, indicated with a cross (+) those diseases which are completely drug immune, and indicated with a double explanation (!!) all of the diseases which were classified a "clear and immediate danger to the global population" which was fancy Americanese for "totally devastating the third world, and could easily jump to and devastate first world populations".

Ebola Virus (*) (!!)
Tuberculous (*) (+) (!!)
Small Pox (*)
River Valley Fever (*) (+)
Marburg (**)
Hantavirus (**) (!!)
HIV (!!) (+)
Choriomenengitis (**) (!!) (+)
Arena Retrovirals (**) (!!) (+)
Gell's Disease (***) (+)

And again, this is the top 10 list of communicable diseases which my team and I worked on. I'm not telling you this for any reason other than to explain why Neupolio (coined the term myself!) took us by such surprise. It's not like we were sitting on our hands. And it's not like we didn't all switch to work on the problem as soon as it became a top priority of the WHO. It's just… there was nothing we could do.

The traditional vaccination procedures did nothing to inoculate against this new strain, and we hadn't even conceived of proper safety protocols to even begin working with this new strain to try and develop a cure. By the time we had convinced enough infectious disease specialists to even jump on board and help work the problem, 10% of the population was already infected, so it was a case of too-little too-late on a problem that was just too-hard. One of the hardest things for doctors to do (I'm told, I was never a "medical professional", always just a research scientist) is triage patients.

We had a very hard time convincing anyone but communicable disease specialists to even work on the problem. Turns out when a group of people go to the American Cancer Society and ask for help to address a disease killing 10% of the population, you get a good hearty chortle in response. This might sound cold, but only until you realize at the time the leading cause of death for our species was cancer. It had dethroned the reaper's old "heart disease" standby in the early 2020s. I think by the time our population was decimated, cancer accounted for 85% of untimely deaths, globally.

It's also relevant to point out that only the poor died from cancer. The upper class of our time rarely ventured outside. Climate controlled everything, hermetically sealed garages and automobiles with air purification systems built into the trunk, water filtration systems built into the engine, fuel vaparators on the roof. The carcinogens that befell our species were simply just not taken up by it's well-to-do. Truly, an entire class of Neroes fiddled while every Rome collectively burned. That's why I bring up the concept of equality; true equality. The rich had managed to cheat death almost completely. From pricy life extension therapy to short-stint cryogenics, the number of options available to the super rich were limited only by the number of zeroes they were worth.

But Neupolio? There was no stopping it. There was no convincing it that you had enough money that it should just bugger off. The poor got it, and spread it to the rich in a matter of days. All the fancy life extension therapy just prevented the normal degradation of centriole reproduction triggers. Imagine you hired a guy to keep your car running in top condition; waxed daily, washed hourly, tuned up whenever it's not running, operated at optimum conditions while running. Now imagine you pushed that car off a cliff into a gigantic metal grinder. That's about the relationship between life extension treatment and infectious disease.

So in the end, just as in the beginning of our country, there was equality; but only in the sense that everyone was once again equally free to die. I still remember my boss' boss' boss' boss' boss' boss' being wheeled into our closed-session meeting where he offered us literally whoever we wanted to cure his disease. Not that he wanted to help bankroll a cure or treatment at all. He literally wanted us to stop working and treat just him. That's the level of hubris I'm talking about here. We were a different class of people to them, a different species. Drone bees serving the queen. We laughed him out of the room. He wanted us all fired, and was equally laughed at by my boss, his boss, his boss' boss, well… you get the idea.

I just really felt it necessary to clarify that s**t was just about as poorly managed as you could imagine. At the end of days, the human spirit had no desire to band together and push us all out of this miserable planetary demise. For most people (civilians, soldiers, scientists, doctors, graphic designers, unemployed guys named Patrick), the "every man for himself" mentality reigned supreme.

In fact, if there's one lesson future civilizations could learn from our mistakes, it's that when societal animals act for the benefit of the individual rather than the species, evolution selects them for extinction. When the number of people was a few million as it is now, we weren't a societal species. You were free to do what you liked, to do whatever you could manage to the planet. Once the numbers hit the billions, we had to start acting more contentiously. We simply did not. Every problem was either an immediate issue of top priority or an issue for future generations to address.

It's not shock to me that our world crumbled around us; but it's still immensely sad.

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