The year was 2025. The United States, exhausted from the Covid epidemic, has grown complacent on the pathogen war front. The similarities to the great 1918 flu epidemic, the deadliest plague in human history, are chilling. The 1918 flu was beginning to sputter after first appearing on earth in sparsely populated Haskell County, Kansas, but for two things. For one, this was wartime, and two, it was a bitterly cold winter. Soldiers and civilians huddled together to keep warm, allowing the flu to gain ground and spread. There was a war of sorts in 2025, albeit a political one, that resulted in the cut off of all research grant funding. One of the pillars human kind had erected to defend against pathogens was removed so there was no way for scholars to connect the dots. And, just as many huddled to keep warm in the winter of 1918, the winter of 2024-2025, while not as severe as that of 1918, brought people together in the first really cold winter in many years. Meanwhile, the pathogens took a page from Muhammed Ali’s rope-a-dope book. The fighter backs into the ring ropes with arms up and lets his opponent flail away to exhaustion. The politicians fought and endless debates followed regarding vaccinations and whether Covid was real or a chimera. Meanwhile the pathogens watched the fighting on the sidelines as if a virus was a sentient being. Viruses are an enigma in that they exist on the edges of life. They are less than fully living organisms and are more like a collection of chemicals. They do not eat, burn oxygen or produce waste. But they do two things very well, they replicate and they mutate. Watching, waiting, Covid found a striking point with the great Bird Flu invasion in the Spring of 2025. The flu, jumping from animals to pigs then humans, spread like wild-fire. “We never saw it coming” the populace would lament. The cold winter of 2025, the huddled masses keeping warm, the Covid fatigue, and the lack of funding to monitor the development of pathogens all exploded when Covid found another lock and key. Most recently, it had mutated to form the key to unlock access to the parts of the brain known as the reptilian brain, the site of critical functions like breathing and heart rate. “Long Covid” had been born. Now it was pathogen rope a dope payoff time. Humankind, crippled by the Bird Flu, was plundered by another Covid variant. It is estimated half the population of the U.S. fell ill with the illness and half of those that fell ill never fully recovered. Every grade-school student is taught those who are unwilling to learn from history are bound to repeat it.
There is much we can learn from the history of pathogens. Two coronaviruses have been isolated from pangolins—a type of scaly, anteater-like mammal—in China. The researchers analyzed the structures of their spike proteins and found that one of the pangolin viruses could recognize the human receptor well, implying that pangolins might have helped the bat virus jump to humans by acting as intermediate hosts. In April 2012, Chinese miners were assigned to clear bat guano from an abandoned copper mine in southwest China. Six of the miners became ill with what was called a mysterious illness, with three deaths. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) were called in to investigate and collect 276 samples from the bats in the mine. They later identified several new coronaviruses. Genomic surveillance sequences the genetic material of pathogens, allowing us to identify and track new variants of a pathogen such as SARS-CoV-2, and so helping us control the spread of diseases like Covid-19. Will we in this year 2030 learn from the past?
Jeffclimbs2801 