The End of October

by Lawrence Wright

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. Curtis Suttle, a marine virologist at the University of British Columbia, collected seawater from oceans all over the world and found that 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. Most of these viruses preyed on bacteria, not humans. 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.

For Henry, 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. The legacy of ancient infections might be found in as much as 8 percent of the human genome, including the genes that controlled memory formation, the immune system, and cognitive development. We wouldn’t be who we are without them.

Many novel diseases came to an end as abruptly as they had appeared. Over eons, nature had hurled many threats in our direction, like meteors burning out in the atmosphere before they did any real damage. Then, of course, along came the big one, the one that wiped out the dinosaurs and most of life on earth. You never knew.

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. When severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) first appeared, Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, charged that the new disease was a man-made synthetic virus that combined measles and mumps, although they are both paramyxoviruses and could not be the basis of a coronavirus. This fallible theory took root in China, which was loathe to assume responsibility for being the point of origin of the disease. A rumor spread like a contagion that only the United States was capable of genetically engineering such a disease, and that it had been deliberately seeded in China to retard its growth as a world superpower.

Had the Chinese been more open about the disease when it first appeared, many people might have spared.

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 Washington was the capital of all that.

They had a simple goal: to destroy trust. Such a modern concept, almost like eliminating friendship, she thought. Could it be possible? In fact, it was surprisingly easy. All the virtues—loyalty, patriotism, courage, honesty, faith, compassion, you name it—are just social constructs, patches to cover the naked barbarism that is at our core.

Carelessness was an underestimated threat to civilization.

This is all about geopolitics, it has nothing to do with the health of their citizens.”

Within a week, grocery stores reopened, and other businesses quickly followed. Political pressure was building to open the borders and let the economy breathe.

By now the origin of the disease—in an Indonesian detention camp for Muslim homosexuals—was well known, and the conspiracists were inflaming fears that Kongoli was a plot. According to one theory, Muslims had created the disease to destroy Christian civilization. Another theory posited that Muslims were being targeted for elimination by neo-Nazi scientists. A third theory postulated a worldwide war against homosexuals. These fantasies were promulgated in social media, led by Russian bots and amplified by internet rumor-mongers, stirring strife by remote control, urging people to take to the streets when they had been warned repeatedly to shelter at home.

was this just the way it was going to be—the powerful, the rich, and the celebrated would be saved. She realized she was being naive. Of course this was how it was bound to be. This is the country we’ve become.

for the fanatics piety becomes a contest. It’s not enough to take care of others, to work for freedom. No. We must annihilate those who believe differently or less than we.

“A friend of mine once said that when good people do good, and evil people do evil, it is not surprising. But when good people do evil, it takes religion to do that.”

amid so much arbitrary death the horizon of one’s own existence seemed alarmingly near.

The driver looked for other stations, but Alex Jones was the only voice in English.

The genius of the new kind of hybrid war that Russia was waging was not only in its deniability. There was also its near-magical ability to stir up insurrection—such as the Army of American Patriots, fomented by Russian bots and manifested in the actual recruitment of hundreds of armed American citizens subverting their own government, unaware that they were acting as a fifth column for the Russians.

The histories of the 1918 pandemic all observed that survivors rarely talked about it afterward. You could almost believe that it hadn’t happened, except for the gravestones with similar dates. We lived through it: that was the attitude. It wasn’t like the Great Depression or the world wars or terrorist attacks; survivors of those events lived their lives with one eye on the past even as they moved on.

The 1918 flu killed twice as many people as died in combat during the entire four years of the First World War, and yet the customary horror of another pandemic was overshadowed by the drama of combat.