The End of October

by Lawrence Wright

Henry understood the courage it took to face an invisible enemy. Brave men and women who rushed into battle would flee from the onset of disease. Disease was more powerful than armies. Disease was more arbitrary than terrorism. Disease was crueler than human imagination. And yet young people like these doctors were willing to stand in the way of the most fatal force that nature has to offer.

DISEASES HAVE A history of stirring up conspiracies.

WORD.

“Sometimes in the secret world you long for better reporters, so we get information to the public that we can’t share ourselves.

In September, the first inoculations for swine flu began. A month later, people began to fall ill—not from the flu, but from the vaccine, which was implicated in causing a paralytic disease called Guillain-Barré Syndrome. In December, the vaccination program was halted. During this time, no one else got swine flu. It was a political disaster for Ford and a caution to future political leaders.

A terrifying note in history about hastily developed and manufactured vaccines...

Schools around the country had reopened as the pandemic lost its grip. People were returning to work, filling up restaurants, and flocking to theaters and sporting events. They stopped wearing respirator masks, drinking in the air that had just recently been so treacherous.

This is almost too close for comfort.

These were parables of a society that was fractured by a disaster that everyone thought had run its course.

What leadership? Tildy thought. The president had been almost entirely absent in the debate about how to deal with the contagion, except to blame the opposing party for ignoring public health needs before he took office.

!!!!!!!!!!!! THISSSSSS!!!!!!

She also wondered if they knew or cared whether they might be taking a chance for life away from someone more useful—a nurse, a cop, a pregnant mother. Or 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.

Accurate.

The contagion had destroyed any sense of community.

Jill recalled other natural disasters, such as hurricanes in North Carolina when she was a child. The city of Wilmington would snap into a well-organized humanitarian machine. Her father had a bass boat, and when the streets flooded, he rescued neighbors trapped in their houses. Nora made food baskets with her daughters. Jill and Maggie loved those purposeful and dramatic days when people pulled together and everyone seemed to care about each other. Disease wasn’t like that. Neighbors were afraid of each other.

The government was constantly trying to reassure citizens that everything possible was being done, but the reassuring lies only gave credence to the most flagrant conspiracy theories. Fearing each other, people withdrew from the common social rituals that protected a society under siege. The absence of truth and the breakdown of trust opened the door to terror, and that was tearing society apart.

“If you paid any attention to the role of disease in human affairs, you’d know the danger we’re in. We got smug after all the victories over infection in the twentieth century. But nature is not a stable force. It evolves, it changes, and it never becomes complacent. We don’t have the time or resources now to do anything other than fight this disease. Every nation on earth has to be involved, whether you think of them as friends or enemies. If we’re going to save civilization, we have to fight together and not against each other.”