Flu Jab...
fiction
“Mom, please remember this is for a classroom of 6th graders, language please.”
“Fine. They weren’t fucking idiots; they were fucking imbeciles.”
“Mom!”
“You said you wanted me to improve their vocabularies!”
“That is not what I meant and you know it.”
Grandma Elle made eye contact with her granddaughter and winked.
“Okay, we’ll try again. The thing I learned about people that surprised me the most was how few of them listened to the experts. And not only didn’t listen but actively disdained them for daring to be experts. Not just the really vocal science deniers, but just your average person on the street who had never met anyone who died from those diseases and so didn’t think people ever did. I had one man tell me, ‘they call them preventable diseases, sweetie’ like he didn’t understand that the vaccine is what was preventing them.”
“But don’t you always say we shouldn’t just accept authority without question?”
“Question doesn’t mean disregarding completely. Yes, I want you to question things. Your mother and father can give you more guidelines on how much of it you can actually do, but yes, question everything. But don’t take your opinion as being of higher value than someone else’s facts.”
“But facts are just other opinions.”
“No. No they aren’t. And whoever told you that is wrong. And that sort of attitude is what caused the crisis, the crises, in the first place.”
“How do you decide whose facts are facts?”
“What are facts?”
“Things people say.”
“Okay, so you have green eyes.”
“No, I don’t. Don’t be silly, look at me, my eyes are brown.”
“But I just said they were green so how do you know which one is a fact?”
“Look at them.”
“Examine the evidence before you. Trust that we both see the same colors. And know that brown is not green even if I say it is. Sometimes it’s as easy as that. Sometimes you have to think about who would be more likely to know something. Your doctor is more likely to understand what is wrong with you when you are sick that your mother or I. Even if we have a good guess from experience, your doctor is going to know from experience and education. Learning about subjects, who knows more about those things. Those are your experts.”
“But some of the experts said…”
“Yes, and that’s where it got tricky. And that’s why a lot more people died than needed to. Some of the experts weren’t really experts. Some of them were just grifters looking for a paycheck. If 9 out of 10 doctors agree, the 10th usually isn’t a visionary but a quack.”
“Mom…”
“Quack was the nicest way I could phrase it.”
“Did anyone in our family die?”
“Yes. Your Great Aunt died. She couldn’t get the vaccine because she had cancer.”
“Cancer made her that sick?”
“Back then cancer made you very sick. The cancer and the way they treated it. They would give your body poison to kill the cancer, but it also made you very weak and more likely to catch other diseases.”
“They gave you poison? Why didn’t they just give you the cure?”
“Because we hadn’t yet gotten that far. They were just starting early testing on the mRNA shots that we have now. She wasn’t in any of the tests and got the Super Bug before she could have gotten the cure.”
“That’s sad.”
“It was very sad. A lot of people died who would have liked to have gotten the vaccines but couldn’t. They relied on everyone else to be healthy to help them stay healthy. The measles part of the Super Bug was highly contagious. Do you know what that means?”
“Easy to catch.”
“Yes, easy to catch. And because it had mutated with the influenza virus and the tuberculosis virus people’s lungs became infected with sores and…”
“Eew…”
“Very eew. And very painful. She basically drowned in her own body from…”
“Mom…”
“Effluvia. You can look that one up. But it was a terrible way to die. And it was so contagious that they didn’t know what to do with the bodies of the people who had died. There was another disease in the world at the time called Ebola, and you could catch the disease from them even a week after they had died. Nobody knew if the Super Bug was like that at first. Eventually they found that it took about 3 days for all of the virus to die off if the person died. But three days with thousands dying is a lot of bodies. The smell alone was…”
“Mom…”
“This is what happened. If they are teaching them a sanitized version in her school she needs to try to understand what it was like.”
“Are you okay, sweetie? If it’s too much we can stop and you can just use what you’ve got so far for your report.”
“Are you kidding me? If I stand up there and read about piles of bodies everybody will be paying attention!”
“Okay, but try not to sound so gleeful about it, okay?”
“Sorry, Grandma.”
“That’s okay, but your mother is right. These were real people. I know sometimes in history books those people don’t seem like they were really alive, but they were. The fact that I was your age when it all happened just means it was a long time ago to you. But to me? It wasn’t.”
“Did they do anything else to stop people from getting it?”
“They talked about it. And some places did more. But a decade or so before the Super Bug hit there had been another global pandemic. During that one they shut a lot of things down, they closed businesses and schools, they asked people to wear masks in public and…well…it didn’t go well. People hated it so much that it led to the problems they had with the Super Bug. Nobody wanted to “go back” to shutdowns and masking. So instead, half of the world’s population died.”
“They refused to do something to stop it? That seems…”
“Like they were fucking imbeciles? Yes, it does. And now you’re just as surprised as I was.”