Джон Ринго - The Last Centurion

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 .

So there we have the stupidity of sentence two. If you're not going to mass immunize, you're not going to stop a disease. It worked with smallpox and polio. It might have worked with a bunch of other diseases, but we got weak. There's a program in the works right now to get started on slamming the door on everything possible, that is everything that transmits only through humans and domesticated animals. Don't know if it will ever work but it's worth a shot.

So, Warrick you pinch-faced lying incompetent bitch, let's take a look at sentence three.

"My advisors recommend them primarily for the elderly and the young."

What advisors? Her advisors for a situation like this were the National Science Advisor, the Director of the National Institute for Health (NIH), the Surgeon General, the Director of the Center for Disease Control and the Commander of USAMRIID.

All five have testified under oath at this point about the decision process, such as it was, leading to 423. Two, the National Science Director and the Surgeon General, took the Fifth. Fuckers. The other three, including the only two epidemiologists consulted, have, however, spoken at length.

The first meeting was called by the National Science Advisor and included, along with various hangers on, the Director of the CDC, the NSD, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Surgeon General. At that meeting, the President announced that the vaccine was to be distributed immediately and that it should be available through county health services. And that it should be given to the young and old first.

Note: This was before any input from the advisors. This according to both the DCDC and the Secretary of Homeland Security.

The DCDC has stated that he demurred after it was clear that neither the NSD or the SG were going to. Why?

First, there was a plan already set up for vaccine distribution. Called, incredibly, the Emergency Vaccine Distribution Plan (incredibly because it actually made sense), it had been in place for years and regularly updated. It was a complicated distro but, effectively, it spread the vaccine through both military and emergency civilian channels to all healthcare providers. There were identification methods. Following initial distribution there was a forced immunization program as a sub-codicil noboby wanted to really use. It was cumbersome. Everyone knew it was cumbersone and that it would take at least a week to get the vaccine down to civilians. But it was designed to work. Might not have, but it was the Plan.