Джон Ринго - The Last Centurion

And thus we get to President Warrick.

Warrick, for all she was a micromanaging bitch, was like a lot of micromanagers. Making a firm decision and sticking with it was anathema. Thus the "I want to get out of Iran but can't figure out how." Now she had people telling her that bird flu was coming and the world was coming to an end. It was only the beginnings of her problems but we all know that .

Anyway, the DOD ordered immediate and required Type Two (fuck me, fuck me) immunizations. They had already stockpiled them. Logistics at the strategic level got suddenly very fucked up as they began using every plane in the inventory to move them to every detachment in the world. Priority parts? Forget it. Personnel? They wait. These were birds that had been blocked out months in advance and, thank God, suddenly every single block, EVERY SINGLE BLOCK became "serum distribution."

That is how to respond to a plague. The Chiefs of Staff ordered it, soft-pedaling it to their idiotic bosses and to the media (because that was the party line) because they saw the writing on the wall and weren't idiots like me.

President Warrick?

"Under Executive Order 423 I am hereby ordering a distribution of vaccines to local health officials. These vaccines will be available to anyone who feels it necessary to get a bird flu shot. My advisors recommend them primarily for the elderly and the young."

I'm rubbing my temples in remembered anger. It is as fresh now as it was ten years ago. Every time I see that pinched face on TV I want to vomit. If I was writing this by hand, I wouldn't be able to. My hands are shaking too bad in a need to kill that bitch.

Three sentences, all of them alike in totally absolute FUCKED UP'EDNESS!

I will take them one at a time.

"Under Executive Order 423 I am hereby ordering a distribution of vaccines to local health officials."

There were over three hundred million stockpiled doses of Type One and nearly a hundred million of Type Two. She specifically ordered Type Two to not be distributed because it had not completed human testing requirements.

Okay, you can give it to the soldiers but not to civilians. Civilians can and will sue. Soldiers cannot. Civilians comprised most of her voting block. And a bunch of her voters, as became obvious, were bug-shit nuts. She wasn't going to tell them to take the better stuff. Better to just go with the known quantity.

But that's not the real core of the fuckedupedness of this sentence. You see, what Executive Order 423 actually ordered was distribution to county health clinics. Only.

The lady was a big believer in socialized medicine. I know, I know, laugh. We all know, now, that that was a death sentence. We know a lot of things. Twenty-twenty hindsight. But she was a believer in it like the pope believes in God. It was Right and it was Just and it was The Only Way.

Under Executive Order 423 . . . hang on . . . I'm sorry, the memories, the hatred, the deaths . . . Fuck. I just have to keep stopping.

Where was I? Oh, first sentence.

Under Executive Order 423 the doses were sent to county health officials. Only.

Effectively, going back to the bottle of water thing, she did what I would have done if I was a complete and total fucking idiot. The federal government had a list of the address of every county health office in the country and a fair guess of how many people they potentially served. That is, if there were ninety thousand people in the county and one health office (common in those days) then they were good for ninety thousand of the total population of the U.S.

They then gave each office sort of a percentage and sent out THE WHOLE STOCKPILE OF VACCINE.

Well, not every bit. They kept a bit back, something like twenty million doses. Not that it helped in the long run. I think I read somewhere that they actually all went bad when Milwaukee had one of their long blackouts and the refrigerators shut down.

Let's make this perfectly clear. Then and even now most people could not tell you where their county health clinic is. Or if there's more than one. When people got sick, they went to their personal physician. Ditto immunizations and such. If they couldn't get an appointment they went to a Doc-In-The-Box. If it was bad, they went to the hospital. Not much has changed.

County Health offices did some reporting and mostly helped out the poor. The people working in them were, by and large, there because it was easy work, steady if low pay and there was a small amount of ego gratification. (And for some, petty power.) Thus the workers, the management, the whole structure tended to be one that was, shall we say, less than suited to crisis management. They went to the seminars and had classes and all the rest. But these were pencil pushers and stampers and people that gave a few shots a month. They were the health equivalent of Fobbits.

They weren't bad people. Don't get me wrong. They were, by and large, good people. Probably better morally than me.

They were the WRONG fucking people to expect to respond heroically to a plague.

These offices, which had limited cold storage space, were suddenly INUNDATED with boxes of serum that HAD to be refrigerated. And because the news media had been beating the drum of BIRD FLU they were, AT THE SAME TIME inundated with customers. At that point you got down to individual reactions. They were as diverse as the county health administrators. All I can do is give three examples. These are not "worst to best" in a grand sense, simply cases I've researched and categorized myself.

Worst: Orange County, California/L.A., CA. I choose this as the classic example of utter fucking stupidity but compounded by sheer volume.

Now, without any real warning they received, at their central warehouse, nearly sixteen million doses. They had cold storage for a bare million. The response of the county health manager (whose name I will not write. Ever.) was to have a meeting. While the doses that were not in cold storage sat in a trailer in hundred degree heat. They had been unloaded from reefers (refrigerated trailers) and placed in the only available storage, outside "CONEX" shipping containers. Unrefrigerated.

According to the minutes of the meeting, this was brought up, repeatedly, by the warehouse manager. The term "heated" and "raised voices" was used in the minutes.

The meeting went on for over six hours. No resolution was found. It didn't really matter. By the time adults stepped in, all the doses were useless.

They were useless . The protein chains they depended upon to do their work were destroyed by heat in less than the six hours it took to have the meeting. By the time a decision was made (days later) by the governor of California, it was so far too late it was insane.

There were, however, one million remaining doses. They were then rationed to those who "truly needed them." This included everyone in county government down to trash collectors. (Although those guys earned their doses later. Those that didn't desert.) And, of course, the head of county health.

There went fifteen million doses of serum.

Intermediate: St. Louis, MO.

Six million doses. Storage for three hundred thousand.

Upon receiving the shipment, the warehouse manager took one look at it and ordered the trucker to drop the reefer. When the trucker refused (it was a leased reefer) the manager explained that what was on there was vital medicines, they did not have storage and that if necessary he would have a cop shoot the trucker if he tried to drive away with the reefer.

(This was in a deposition, witness the truck driver, Morell Hermon, who asked for and received one of the shots while he was there. He stated that at the time he was angry at the decision because it caused him some personal grief and economic hardship, but wanted to thank the warehouse manager for being so farsighted. Alas, his boss was less so.)