Wishing for a “Plandemic”

One of the local wingnuts on a Facebook group keeps calling the coronavirus “a plandemic.” She, of course, is an idiot like everyone clueless enough to call themselves “conservatives” when they are radically right wing and as uneducated and stupid as an empty Starbucks cup; maybe a cup with a mouthful of used Skoal staining the bottom. The last time she babbled some “plandemic” drivel, I asked her if she knew anyone smart enough to bake a cake without using a mix. Then, I went on to tell her that “I actually do know a couple of people who work in gene manipulation and that if they were inclined to design a virus that would do some damage it wouldn’t have a paltry 5% fatality rate. What would be the point? Do you seriously think you or the rest of the Trumpanzees or even Trump and his corrupt band of mobsters are important enough to set off this international disaster?” I haven’t heard back from her yet, but I’m sure when I do the response will be . . . memorable and hilarious.

That got me to thinking about a story I’ve put off finishing for more than 20 years. My story was ab out an FDA/CDC investigator chasing down a GMO that might be causing world reproduction rates to crash. My experiences in the US medical device industry put me on to the idea in the late 90’s and, as usual, I got about 2/3 of the way through the book and got bored with myself.

My variation on that idea is that the novel coronavirus was engineered, but it was not engineered to be a killer but as a reproductive system attack. The large number of people under-40 who get this virus are asymptomatic, which is what gave me the idea. If a virus was engineered to be asymptomatic but to sterilize as many people as possible, COVID-19 might be pretty similar to how that would work out. However, without significant testing it might not have been apparent to the designers that it would kill so many seniors and other people with “underlying conditions.” There wouldn’t be a real opportunity to do such a test, in fact. The entire design might have been laboratory-based and until the first half-million or so were infected, it’s possible that the designers could have thought this could have been under-the-WHO radar until it was wide-spread.

I am not sure who the protagonist(s) or the antagonist(s) would be in this story. I have found that my interest in writing long fiction is zilch. I guess I don’t have the attention span or tolerance for what remains of the publishing industry or even the miniscule reading public. It seems like the kind of thing Robin Cook used to do, but there is no market for “selling ideas” in fiction. The work is what is worth the money, not the basic ideas.