Health Officials: This Sure is Super Weird 🤷‍♂️

Imagine this dumb movie

Jun 01, 2022

Imagine you are a society in a long-term information war with an empirically evil foreign adversary — who just started committing atrocities through kinetic war on your border after years of softening up your population through psychological operations.

To make bad guys worse, this one has developed a totalist ideology that makes him capable of anything, including murdering huge numbers of human beings.

Imagine this guy has a long history of researching and producing biological weapons, including genetically altered diseases and active laboratories with stockpiles of dangerous bugs. What if he has a particular hatred for LGBTQ+ people and has institutionalized government suppression and hatred against them?

Imagine he had been coordinating a massive propaganda operation recently — from his own lips as well as a huge network of assets — that there were a lot of “biolabs” that were going to start magically emitting bioterror, unless he rolls in with his manly military to stop it from happening.

For extra menace, he has conspicuously used chemical and radiological weapons against civilians many times in the past.

Now, what if this guy’s war starts going sideways. The despot’s military is not so manly after all. His plan to attack has stalled. If he retreats, he loses support at home and may lose power. If he continues to push forward and his soldiers keep dying, he loses support at home and may lose power anyway.

You might think this would make him pretty desperate.

You also might think this imaginary society would be on guard for any sign of biological attack. It would be pretty logical to think that something unthinkable like that is quite thinkable under the circumstances.

OK, that’s quite a ridiculous premise for a story, I realize. This imaginary world sounds pretty fucked up, right? But here’s where the story takes an even dumber turn. Check this part out.

Out of nowhere, a disease that has always showed up in a small part of the undeveloped world, except under very extreme and specific circumstances, suddenly has a completely unheard of outbreak. But like, everywhere all at once — in places it has never showed up before. Ever.

In this movie, transmission seems centered around a massive Gay Pride event thousands of miles from where anyone catches the disease under normal circumstances. In fact, the primary way the disease has been spread is animals because the disease is literally zoonotic and rarely spreads from person to person.

But suddenly, because of the specific origin of the outbreak, it seems like this rare disease is being spread by gay sex, and for extra dramatic effect involves a symptom often centered around the genitals.

The disease also happens to be one of the bugs it is well-known that the bad guy has stockpiled and weaponized. We also learn it has been shown to hang around in the air for four days if aerosolized.

Now, this stupid scenario would get stupider still if this society — that should be on its toes for any possible biological anomaly — just crinkled its brow and threw its hands in the air and said: “Gee whiz! That’s a strange one! There’s no natural explanation, so I’m stumped! Fresh out of ideas. Probably ought to wait until it’s out of control to tell anyone what’s going on.”

🫤

For no particular reason, here’s some links and screenshots about biolabs and monkeypox.