The End of October

by Lawrence Wright

The native forests and peatland were being torched to make way for more palm plantations. Tbey supplied the oil used in about half the packaged products found in supermarkets, from peanut butter to lipstick. Each year, smog from the fires blanketed Southeast Asia, killing as many as a hundred thousand people in some seasons, and pushing global warming to a tipping point.

Jakarta was a city of shantytowns, but also of skyscrapers sinking slowly into the earth. The booming population kept sucking water from the aquifer beneath their feet, causing the ground they lived on to collapse as the sea around them continually rose. It’s a form of civic suicide,

Indonesia jealously clung to the microbes, arguing that the disease was a national resource, like gold or oil.

H1N5

Tildy held Putin responsible for the tens of millions of dollars that passed through his sticky fingers while people starved.

Henry’s mind was always stalked by the fear that some form of the plague would recur.

the sixth century, during the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian, when fifty million people died—about a quarter of the entire world population.

“the Black Death” because of the gangrene that appeared on the extremities of the infected person, it began in China in 1334 and followed the trade routes through Central Asia and Europe, killing as many as 200 million people before subsiding in 1353. The last plague pandemic also began in China, in the mid-nineteenth century, and, thanks to steamships, quickly spread around the world. India alone lost 20 million people, and nearly 80 percent of those who contracted the disease died of it. There was still no effective vaccine for pneumonic plague.

Then Ebola had taken him to school. Among diseases, it was a diva—dramatic, sudden, and vicious. Bleeding was the most obvious symptom, out of every pore, eyes, ears, nose, anus, even the nipples, the fluid being a pathway for the virus to escape the body and search out new victims.

one of the defining symptoms of Ebola was hiccups. No one knew why. Like

RNA viruses was that they were constantly reinventing themselves over and over again in what was called a “mutant swarm.”

It spent as much as three weeks in the body before symptoms showed up, so a full-blown epidemic could be undetectable until it suddenly fell like a guillotine blade.

Ebola was not airborne. It only spread through contact with bodily fluids—sex, kissing, touching, and, especially, caring for the sick and the dead. It was a disease that specifically targeted love and compassion.

Twenty years before, no one thought there were viruses in the oceans, but researchers had since shown that a single liter of seawater contained about 100 billion of them.

90 percent of the viruses he examined were totally unknown to man.

more than 800 million viruses were deposited every day on every single meter of the earth’s surface.

The total number of viruses on the planet was estimated to be a hundred million times more than the number of stars in the universe.

the most surprising feature of viruses was that they were a guiding force behind evolution. If the infected organism survived, it sometimes retained a portion of the viral material in its own genome.

DISEASES HAVE A history of stirring up conspiracies. Jews were held responsible for the Black Plague in the fourteenth century, and they were massacred in hundreds of European cities, including two thousand Jews burned alive in Strasbourg, France, on Valentine’s Day, 1349.

China, which had hidden an epidemic of SARS in the south the year before and lied about the extent of a new outbreak in Beijing.

Fear was the growth hormone that had transformed America into a security state following 9/11. Now it was sustained by inertia and greed, and

She was well aware of the administration’s lynch mob, out to get anyone who spoke to the press.

Ethel, less guilty than Julius, had to be shocked five times. Smoke rose from her head. The

Fancy Bear was so good at it. They were having such fun, ruining the world.

It was a sport to conjure up the most absurd idea and see if people could be persuaded to believe it. Someone nominated “cheese pizza” as a code word for child pornography. John Podesta was a regular customer of Comet Ping Pong. It all followed from there.

Pizzagate

MERS was endemic in camels, although it wasn’t clear whether the animals got the disease from people or vice versa. An odd feature was that 80 percent of the human victims were male. Why was that?

the virus was ferried along by dust, and that women who wore veils were partially protected—a

After oil, the hajj was the only real business Saudi Arabia had.

By now night had fully occupied the sky, which was splattered with stars that seemed merely a few feet away. “I can see why religions are born in the desert,” Henry said. “Yes, we have this problem,” Majid said. “God is always on top of us.”

The initial diagnosis of swine flu was wrong—it turned out to be an atypical pneumonia that would later be called Legionnaires’ Disease—but

In 1918, the H1N1 flu killed between fifty and a hundred million people. In 1976, it killed only one. For

maddening feature of the 1918 pandemic was that there was so little record of it.

Many people questioned the wisdom of bringing the Spanish flu virus back to

No shit

Carelessness was an underestimated threat to civilization.

The U.S. program tested anthrax and other dangerous diseases on human volunteers—mainly, conscientious objectors.

Nazi scientists who had experimented on prisoners of war and concentration camp victims were brought into the American research effort.

There were awful scenes in those rooms sometimes, especially with the primates, which were childlike and helpless but also knowing and vengeful.

the screams of a test animal reached the ears of those in cages waiting their turn, they would cry out in terror.

Why are tgey vivisecting

future also demanded the euthanization of thousands and thousands of animals.

We have a report from three of our hospitals of a hemorrhagic fever among the pilgrims.”

Why 2 weeks for the xector and a few days for them

The concept of holiness meant nothing to Henry, but he recognized that Majid lived partly in the supernatural, where the imaginary had the force of the real, and what felt morally weightless to Henry imposed an awful burden on the conscience of his friend.

In her opinion, Russia was the main source of evil in the world.

Agree

there was no other way of dealing with Putin. One had to be resolute and maybe even a little crazy.

million bureaucrats really run the place, and they pay minimal attention to the Great Leader. It’s a third-rate country masquerading as a superpower with an economy about the size of South Korea. We give it far more credit than it deserves.

Everybody knows that the Saudis are overmatched. The only card they hold is American power.

Emptiness. This is the soul of Arabia. You have to understand that to really know who we are.

Henry studied the face of the crown prince. He was young and handsome and totally ruthless, a man who made a habit of imprisoning or killing his enemies and defying the condemnation of the world and his own family, which was cowed by his appetite for revenge.

Saudi

“Putin is a tightrope walker. He wants to draw the U.S. deeper into the Middle East without actually going to real war.”

“They’ve got much greater control over their infrastructure. It’s very strictly regulated. Probably they have a program to isolate their systems controls from the internet. So they would have a considerable competitive advantage in a cyberwar where the target is the infrastructure that supports civilization.”

“Or if they don’t care if they also die,” said Henry. “If they think they will become martyrs.”

The Russians?

the assault of humanity’s most cunning and relentless enemy, the microbe?

Also a huge ally