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What Would an Extinction-Level Pandemic Look Like? A Thought Experiment
Humanity’s worst-case scenario — stay up all night with me on this one…
“Measles is no big deal,” she said to me. I’d been arguing with a “crunchy mom” type on the train from Washington to Philadelphia. She was convinced that two dead children in Texas and one dead adult in New Mexico (all three unvaccinated) were no big deal. Why? The current Secretary of Health and Human Services had told her so. “You get it and become immune for life.”
“Sure,” I said as I rolled my eyes. “A one in twenty chance of hospitalization, a one in one thousand chance of encephalitis, one in one thousand of death, and one in one thousand of a deadly encephalitis years later. Sounds safe.”
“Safer than the vaccine,” she sneered.
“So what would it take to ‘scare’ you into getting vaccinated?” I asked. She had earlier claimed she was not vaccinated against anything and went through COVID-19 without ever testing positive. Probable but unlikely.
“It would take something being a threat to all of humanity, not just the obese people who don’t eat healthy and eat all that processed food.”
Challenge accepted. Let’s see what kind of pathogen would threaten all of humanity. What would…
