This chapter, the most remote of the remote antarctic stations, which is why today’s interviewee lives there.
We meet in “The Dome,” the reinforced, geodesic greenhouse that draws power from the station’s geothermal plant. These and many other improvements were implemented by Mister Scott when he leased the station from the Russian government. He has not left it since the Great Panic.
He’s hiding out, you see. Like a great deal of this book, this at first seems clever and intriguing, then will end up feeling dumb and badly reasoned.
Okay, so we start off with a rant lecture about how no one understands economics, it’s all totally random, and the only part that’s understandable is that fear sells everything.
When I first heard about the outbreaks, back when it was still called African rabies, I saw the opportunity of a lifetime. I’ll never forget that first report, the Cape Town outbreak, only ten minutes of actual reporting then a full hour of speculating about what would happen if the virus ever made it to America. God bless the news.
This was my dad’s favorite thing about the book. It’s not exactly subtle but yeah, fucking American journalism they deserve to get eaten by zombies.
Unfortunately the author’s not really any better when it comes to the research aspects.
I was the first one to come up with a workable pitch: a vaccine, a real vaccine for rabies. Thank God there is no cure for rabies. A cure would make people buy it only if they thought they were infected. But a vaccine! That’s preventative! People will keep taking that as long as they’re afraid it’s out there!
That’s not really how it works.
Now a vaccine does have the benefits of everyone wanting it, but they’re not going to keep taking it forever, because it’s a vaccine. Yeah, you need to get new shots occasionally, but when you’re banking on panic, your plan shouldn’t involve it lasting three years. No, as the fucking bird flu demonstrated, if you want to print money, you need something that’ll nebulously help to some unknown degree so you need piles of it, and also no upstart is going to get in on it.
For those of you who only recall the panicked screaming of idiots from the news in that period, tamiflu is possibly the most fucking stupid response to an epidemic since everyone decided the black death would be helped by killing cats. Tamiflu’s claim to fame is that it makes it harder for the viruses to get out of infected cells. It does nothing to actually kill them, so using the stuff very, very quickly breeds for resistant viruses. As such, it’s completely useless for any large-scale epidemic. It’s presumably the inspiration here, since the book came out in late 2006, but the author missed all the details.
Speaking of details. Although there’s already a vaccine for rabies, for some reason they had to invent one, even though all it was for was for “rabies”. He explains it got shoved through the FDA because the FDA had been gutted and the rest of the government ordered it to happen. No word on why no one just said the existing vaccine for rabies worked and went from there.
Remember the speech the prez made before Congress, how it had been tested in Europe for some time and the only thing holding it up was our own “bloated bureaucracy”? Remember the whole thing about “people don’t need big government, they need big protection, and they need it big-time!” Jesus Christmas, I think half the country creamed their pants at that. How high did his approval rating go that night, 60 percent, 70?
Ah yes, it’s a return to chapters contradicting each other.
This is drawing a comparison to the Bush years, as his own approval rating skyrocketed up to 92% (also reminding us that 70% is not such a big deal) but that serves to remind us that the Bush years showed us that disaster is a political windfall and that America desperately wants to be told they need to work together and do something, even something as stupid as “buy duct tape”. Here people are rewarding a government that’s doing a thing to protect them, so why were previous chapters about how if the government was doing another thing to protect them it’d be political suicide? Even if we accept that the cost of phrase two would be so ridiculously great the country would balk at it, saying they were training anti-zombierabies squads would’ve gotten people happy. Telling people about the warning signs of the virus and how we all need to work together to keep it off our shores would’ve made people happy. People want to do stuff. They want meaning, they want ways they can help.
Our interviewer for once decides it’s time to push. Not on the guy saying there were superantizombie teams that eliminated all witnesses evidence, but on the guy everyone already hates.
And you didn’t know if it would work?
We knew it would work against rabies, and that’s what they said it was, right, just some weird strain of jungle rabies.
Who said that?
You know, “they,” like, the UN or the…somebody. That’s what everyone ended up calling it, right, “African rabies.”
Was it ever tested on an actual victim?
Why? People used to take flu shots all the time, never knowing if it was for the right strain. Why was this any different?
Anyway, the author seems unaware of the actual problems. Let’s consider the very history of the rabies vaccine.
The rabies vaccine was made from the live virus, potentially infecting the people it was meant to save. The first human trial was done on a kid who’d been quite thoroughly mauled by a rabid dog, whose death was otherwise inevitable, and the reason after-the-fact vaccination works so well in rabies is because it’s rare for having an extremely long dormancy period. Also, he injected the poor kid with steadily increasing amounts of rabies along the way, which would probably have infected him if the vaccination thing hadn’t worked – and immune responses differ based on the disease. That’s why we’re not all lining up for AIDS vaccines right now. Injecting steadily more virulent AIDS mostly just gives you AIDS.
“African rabies” is a human-only disease. We’ll learn later that it causes instant death in all forms of life (except humans, because). You can’t so much as cultivate it, let alone test it on other animals. And from the fact people can reanimate even if they’re killed immediately after contact, it clearly does not have any dormancy period at all and infects immediately, possibly instantly using the power of magic.
With that in mind, how do you test it? If it doesn’t work on someone who’s already infected, that tells us nothing. Maybe it doesn’t work, or maybe this disease just doesn’t have rabies’ friendly wait. So you’d have to inject someone uninfected with your completely untested vaccine that might serve to infect them. If they don’t get infected, you then have to infect them on purpose and see if they still don’t die.
Note this is impossible because little do they know this is a magic virus with 100% transmission.
If they could reliably create a completely inactive form of the virus, which is difficult under the best circumstances, they’d still need to deliberately infect someone to actually verify it worked. And it’s entirely possible the vaccine was boosting survivability but the first person dies anyway – let’s say the vaccine gave you a 70% chance, which is seventy more percent than you normally have. There’s still a 30% chance the first guinea pig dies anyway, which is why we usually use guinea pigs or hamsters or rats or something, so we can try it with a few hundred and see what happens.
So here’s the thing. They don’t need to be giving people some new rabies vaccine that’s made of existing rabies vaccine. They could easily have made an actual vaccine out of dead zombie bits.
I don’t remember if it’s explained in this book or just in the stupid Survival Guide, but the virus instantly dies outside of a human host – never mind that a rotting corpse isn’t a “host” in any homeostasis-maintaining way any longer. Point is, it’s easy, if confusing, to kill. Because it works on author says so, the virus is also impossible for your immune system to fight or anything to stop ever, so you could could get dead goo injected into your veins all day and it wouldn’t do you any good.
The reason this isn’t how it went down is because of the author’s mess of the timeline. Despite all the outbreaks, despite everyone’s original response being various flavors of quarantine, despite Israel at least packing the people into vans instead of destroying the head, no one is allowed to study or understand them, so no one could be draining their mysteriously produced black goo to make a vaccine.
Our interviewer, determined that this alone will not be full of softballs, mentions the damage from all this, and Mr. Snake Oil rightly points out that there were scares all the time that went nowhere. Then he asked well, what if someone found out?
You know, rereading this chapter it’s even flimsier than I remember. What if someone found out? It’s not like this was standing in the way of some better solution. I guess it’s a bit opiate of the masses, but the government made a very clear choice to not do its job and leave everyone to become zombie chow. I mean, we’re talking about things that chew your face off, a vaccine to not get infected is a minor secondary issue! If no one was doing anything about the face-chewing part, it didn’t have to do with if there was a vaccine or not.
Anyway, he goes on for a bit about how everyone wanted it to be good, including the doctors because it was a prescription drug and…I’m not entirely sure I follow there, doctors don’t like prescribing shit to people that much. Anyway, he then sold a million other knickknacks under the same brand name that were useless, and everyone sat back and let him to this as well.
Remember when we started to get our first cases here in the States, that guy in Florida who said he’d been bitten but survived because he was taking Phalanx? OH! [He stands, mimes the act of frantic fornication.] God freakin’ bless that dumbass, whoever he was.
This is where I stopped and eyed the book suspiciously the first time through. He’s a caricature of the author’s hates, and it’s here it’s hardest to ignore that. This guy is scared enough of everyone that he’s living in the most remote location on earth and somehow has lucked out that no one’s caught a ride on the supply truck and shot him yet. He should know better than to gloat this obviously. He was good enough at lying to sell his product, but somehow he can’t shut up now.
Interviewer self insert continues to hammer on the whole “but it didn’t work” whining:
But that wasn’t because of Phalanx. Your drug didn’t protect people at all.
And if it did work…? They’d still all have gotten their faces eaten by zombies. It wasn’t protecting them from that.
I think the core problem here is that the author’s trying to write this as if it’s about infectious disease, but the problem with zombies isn’t so much the possibility of infection, it’s that the carriers of it are chewing on your intestines. Any degree of medical treatment would stop the disease in its tracks – again getting back to rabies, in the days before there was a vaccine humans were not transmitting it to other humans. They got bit by an animal, they went to the doctor, the doctor was very sad and told them they had rabies and would die, they didn’t then run off to wait for the disease to kick in and then go on a biting spree, disease contained. There’s a reason it’s always animals biting people when you hear about rabies transmission.
I mean, if this made it so people were bit and didn’t go to the hospital, that might have caused some difficulty, but if a rotting corpse tore a chunk out of your shoulder, you’re going to call 911 anyway. And even if you decided to tough it out, it takes a stupid long while to turn into a zombie, so the symptoms would start up and then you’d go to the hospital. If people weren’t going to the hospitals then I’d say the blame lies in our broken health care system, not a few sugar pills. (That aspect, of course, isn’t mentioned at all. And the only immigration problems are the Chinese, nothing about how if you’re infected while Mexican, you may be afraid of going to a hospital or just plain can’t take a day off work.)
Now, if this was a normal infectious disease, then yeah, telling people they’re safe is bad because they won’t avoid the sick and all that. But the sick are rotting corpses with black goo coming out, so I think that’s already covered.
Anyway, he says that his fake drug caused a huge boom that ended the recession, which sure why not.
And then? When the outbreaks became more serious, and the press finally reported that there was no wonder drug?
Pre-fucking-cisely! That’s the alpha cunt who should be shot, what’s her name, who first broke that story! Look what she did! Pulled the fuckin’ rug right out from under us all! She caused the spiral! She caused the Great Panic!
I believe this is the first female character who accomplished anything much. I’ll be keeping an eye out for how very few of those we have.
At the time I thought it was pretty obvious that he’s using the word cunt because he’s a horrible person and illustrating through example how not to be, but language later in the book suggests that the author doesn’t think much of that.
Anyway, we close with him saying that he has no regrets and it’s really the fault of everyone else for saying it was rabies or believing his claims.
If there’s a hell…[giggles as he talks]…I don’t want to think about how many of those dumb shits might be waiting for me. I just hope they don’t want a refund.
So basically this chapter is stupidly over the top. Okay, yes, with a lot of scams you believe they’re secretly thinking all sorts of shit, but it beggars belief that they’d be saying it out loud, let alone to a reporter, let alone as that reporter gets visibly more angry. The reporter got in. Lots of other people could do, and in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, there’s no lack of people who know how to cave in a skull.