The flu is coming—and eventually, another pandemic. Consensus says, we’re not prepared. But don’t take it from me. There have been warnings.
This doomy New York Times op-ed, for example, points out that the bugs that strike seasonally are starting to outstrip our power to inoculate against them—while our worldwide connectedness and global dependence on life-saving drugs manufactured in India and China only speed up an inevitable flu pandemic’s path of destruction.
And a whole heap of bad news from Australia, where the seasonal flu hits months sooner, suggests an especially merciless strain is headed our way. And then the fact that this year’s flu shot is as little as 10 percent effective (compared to the average of 35 percent) tells us we’re not going to get out ahead of the yearly bug. But it’s nothing compared to what will come next: a new strain, one we’re not genetically or medically prepared to fight, that will whip around the world.
“A seasonal flu is like having a garbage-can fire versus fighting forest fire,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, who runs the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and co-wrote the aforementioned doomy op-ed. The pandemic, the forest fire, is inevitable and unpredictable, he explained to me in a call Tuesday. And noting the seasonal flu we’re portentously unprepared for, he added, “If we can’t do well with the early test, we certainly can’t handle the real thing.”
Perhaps most eerily of all: It’s been 100 years since the first wave of Spanish influenza, which by the time of its second lap around the world in 1920 had killed from 50 million to 100 million. Phil Terzian marked the centennial in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard. Our forgetfulness of history, and Terzian’s timely reminder, make a 2018 pandemic feel cruelly fated.
Pouring billions of federal dollars into universal flu vaccine research, of the sort that could theoretically preempt a pandemic, won’t hurt. But it won’t guarantee a timely fix to prevent a global bug or predict the provenance of a flu new strain, either: Osterholm refers to a “genetic roulette table on steroids” and says, “The likelihood a pandemic virus will fly out of that mix is absolutely real. We just don’t know when.” Which brings me to the real point of this post: A vicious flu season—what with its incumbent invitation to panic about a pandemic—is as good a time as any to dig into some meaty, fast-paced fiction.
Has everybody read The Stand? It’s long, and flawed. But soon we’ll all have time, when we’re under government-mandated flu quarantine, to finish Stephen King’s 1978 horror thriller cum guidebook for the new world order. Anyway, the best thing about the book—a pulpy yet christological post-apocalyptic epic—is probably its ensemble of flu survivors.
They’re heroes and villains who wouldn’t have amounted to much if not for the super bug that killed off most every other contender for greatness. Stu Redman, an ordinary guy whose extraordinary valor surfaces only post-plague, and Lloyd Henreid, a small-time crook turned crony to Satan, would be anonymous nobodies if a superbug not unlike the one Osterholm warns of hadn’t taken out all their friends in the first chapters.
No one’s ever read The Stand without imagining what his own untapped wells of heroism would add to the leadership of the good guys’ colony, the “Free Zone,” where they worship hokey prophetess Mother Abigail and plot to take on the evil minions of cowboy-devil Randall Flagg. King’s readers, if not Osterholm’s, come to understand though that each of these heroes and villains lived his or her boring pre-apocalyptic years with a certain destiny already carved into his DNA. Which is part of what makes it such an engrossing and seasonally appropriate read: The previously unremarkable individuals fated to inherit the earth aren’t just graced with genetic immunity. They’re special—more special than an overcrowded pre-flu society ever allowed them to be. And so are you.
Like panicked reports of the worst ever flu season, the 40-year-old novel encourages a very 2018 line of scorched-earth fantasy (h/t SMOD): A scrappy few survivors left to rebuild the world from fluish ruin. (And it makes a much better mid- to lowbrow winter read than Michael Wolff’s anti-escapist work of only semi-fiction.) So get reading! There’s limited time left for survivalist daydreams before the flu—in all probability, let’s be honest—gets you too.
